Israel was the last successful colonial project taken on by the British Empire — THE western, colonial power par excellence. We cannot accurately understand what is happening in Israel/Palestine today until we grasp that point.
As in every project of settler colonialism throughout history, the native people must be replaced, eliminated, expelled, made to disappear.
When the natives resist, the colonizers justify their rampant land theft and brutalization of the indigenous people by labeling them as sub-human savages, blood thirsty brutes, terrorists who live only for violence.
This dehumanization of the native people frames the settlers’ ongoing attacks against the stubborn natives as justifiable acts of “self-defense.” Even ethnic cleansing is excusable as the noble act of brave pioneers paving the way for civilization.
Colonialism always creates conflict. But colonial conflicts are always asymmetrical. That is, one side is the conquering aggressor who comes with superior weapons and technology.
For my money, the colonial aggressor is always in the wrong.
The other side, the native side, is always the victim forced to act defensively, whose resistance against colonial aggression is turned against them as justification for another wave of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Remember Geronimo.
What is happening right now is Israel/Palestine is NOT another round in a long-standing “conflict” between Jews and Arabs.
That is the dominant framing chosen by Israel’s Jewish colonizers. It is the framing that gets all the air-time and publicity because Israel is the overpowering aggressor who holds all the power in a very, very asymmetrical relationship with the suppressed and occupied Palestinians.
The only accurate, historical framing for the violence occurring today in Jerusalem is to see that Israeli colonialism continues by force of arms.
Israel is still colonizing the West Bank; still working to eradicate “the natives.” Oh, how troublesome those pesky natives can be.
Palestinians, for their part, are still resisting their colonizers; still standing up against the most powerful military in the Middle East.
No, this is not a conflict. It is a bloody, grotesque anachronism.
An outpost of western colonialism in the Middle East, originally underwritten by a now defunct imperial empire, is still trying to use 19th century tactics in a 21st century world.
So far, the world has turned a blind eye to Israel’s colonial, ethnic cleansing industry. I hope and pray that that time is coming to an end.
Below is a good clip from Al Jazeera News giving a fairly balanced perspective on the recent attacks against Palestinian worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque.
At the 6:47 mark, an interview begins with Ines Abdel Razek, the Advocacy Director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD). She does an excellent job of explaining what is happening today in Jerusalem and placing it in its proper context.
Today I am writing a series of posts about the tragic stream of events unfolding in Israel.
The Israeli government is in the process of evicting numerous Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem area called Sheikh Jarrah. East Jerusalem, including the Old City of Jerusalem, is part of the occupied West Bank.
The entire West Bank was captured and occupied by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967 — a war begun by Israel’s offensive attacks against Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Ever since, Israel has persisted in violating International Law and the
A Palestinian woman reacts as she carries a toddler, while Jewish settlers move out the belongings of a Palestinian family from a house in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)
Geneva Convention by a) forcing Palestinian residents from their homes, and b) encouraging Jewish settlers to move into Palestinian Occupied Territory.
These types of evictions have been happening for a long time all throughout Israel/Palestine. The Israeli government refers to the process as “Judaization.” That’s Israel’s term, not mine.
The Israeli government is justifying the Sheikh Jarrah evictions by claiming that these properties were originally owned by Jews prior to the war in 1948. So, they are only “reclaiming” Jewish property.
Imagine an Irish-American organization sending its “settlers” into what are now Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. They pass through the streets knocking on doors announcing, “This property used to be owned by Irish people. Get out.”
I would call that kind of behavior racist. The Jewish Defense League would call it antisemitic.
Can these displaced Palestinians return to their original homes and properties taken from them (or more likely demolished) by Jewish militias in 1948?
Of course not. They are Palestinians. They have no right of return. Only Jews can claim that “right” in Israel.
That’s what makes Israel an apartheid Jewish Supremacist State.
Several Palestinian rights organizations have submitted a “Joint Urgent
Israeli settlers in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah mock anti-settler demonstrators from the Palestinian home they have taken over. April 16, 2021. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
Appeal to the United Nations Special Procedures on Forced Evictions in East Jerusalem” to the UN. This proposal carefully documents the legal circumstances at play in right now in East Jerusalem.
It is important to understand this history because most US media outlets will never fill-in these blanks. I have posted an excerpt below.
I encourage you to read the entire document, complete with its abundant citations and corroborating documentation:
Since the forcible displacement of 85 per cent of the Palestinian population during the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 by Zionist settler-colonial forces, Israel designed and issued a series of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, forming the foundation of its institutionalised regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, and Palestinian refugees and exiles abroad.
Israel has ensured the maintenance of its apartheid regime over the Palestinian people through its policies and practices, such as the strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people, including by denying Palestinian refugees and other persons displaced from their homes their inalienable right to return, and the appropriation of their homes, lands and property, coupled with the creation of a coercive environment designed to drive the ongoing transfer of Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. In occupied and illegally-annexed East Jerusalem, 15 Jerusalemite families totalling 37 households of around 195 Palestinians, residing in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood in Silwan, are currently at imminent risk of forced eviction. Unlawfully applying Israeli domestic law to occupied territory, Israeli courts have ruled in favour of lawsuits undertaken by settler organisations to evict the 15 Palestinian families. Most of the families living in Karm Al-Ja’ouni area and Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood, who are facing the threat of forced eviction, are refugees. . .
. . . To cement Palestinian dispossession and displacement in East Jerusalem, Israel enacted the Legal and Administrative Matters Law in 1970, which exclusively allows Israeli Jews to pursue claims to land and property ownership allegedly owned by Jews in East Jerusalem before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In accordance with the 1970 Law, “assets of Jews” in East Jerusalem, which were managed by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property until 1967, were transferred to the Israeli Custodian General within the Ministry of Justice. The Custodian General has the authority to release the properties to Israeli Jews who claim ownership, or claim that they inherited properties from before the establishment of the State of Israel, upon their request. Utilising the discriminatory aforementioned law, Jewish Trusts and Jewish entities with unclear legal status have secured land ownership in Batn Al-Hawa neighbourhood in Silwan and Karm AlJa’ouni area in Sheikh Jarrah by the Custodian General. Later, these Jewish Trusts and entities sold their ownership rights or transferred their management to settler organisations, which do not have ties to the original alleged Jewish owners. In turn, the settler organisations, which envision further settlement expansion in occupied and illegally-annexed East Jerusalem, have been filing eviction lawsuits against Palestinians in Israeli courts.
You can read the entire document now before the United Nations here.
Imagine that one of these children is your son or daughter.
Imagine that you live under military law.
You have no civil rights; no freedom of speech; no freedom of movement or right to assemble; no right to protest or object to your mistreatment.
Imagine that you can be arrested without charge for anything at any time, based solely on the whim of the soldier who grabs you and throws you into the back of his truck.
Imagine that your child will be forcefully “interrogated” as he/she sits alone in a concrete cell surrounded by hostile, aggressive soldiers.
Imagine that these soldiers will hit, kick, slap, punch, ridicule, and humiliate your child with impunity. And you alone will be left to treat his/her injuries.
Imagine that you have no recourse for complaint. No one listens to your demands for an explanation. They may not even tell you where your child was taken.
Imagine that your complaints can only be heard by a military judge in a military court where Palestinians effectively never win a case.
This is Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.
Below is a video of Israeli soldiers arresting 5 Palestinian children, ages 8 through 13. Their “crime” was picking wild herbs and vegetables near an illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.
It is another example of the way Israel criminalizes Palestinians for merely existing in their own land.
The video was released by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Below is an excerpt from Aljazeera describing the arrest.
Israeli forces detained five Palestinian children for several hours after they were confronted by Jewish settlers while gathering wild vegetables near a settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli human rights group said on Thursday.
B’Tselem released video of the arrest in the southern Hebron Hills, in which heavily armed Israeli soldiers can be seen dragging the children away.
Footage shot earlier shows the children gathering akoub, a plant similar to artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.
The outpost is located near Masafer Yatta, a collection of about 19 Palestinian hamlets. The area is a frequent target of assaults by the Israeli military and settlers.
“This is another example of the absolute disregard on the part of Israeli authorities and forces on the ground to the wellbeing and rights of Palestinians, no matter how young or vulnerable,” B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz said.
“The youngest boy from yesterday’s incident is eight years old,” he added.
The children, whose ages range from eight to 13, were held for about five hours
An Israeli soldier detains a Palestinian boy during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah August 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
at a police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, according to Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer who is representing them. The two eldest, who are 12 and 13, were ordered to return next week for more questioning as, under Israeli military law, they are deemed old enough to face charges. . .
. . . According to Defense for Children International, Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Prisoners’ rights group Addameer has said 140 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned by Israel.
Recently, one of Terry’s (my wife) Facebook posts was flagged and deleted for violating Facebook’s content policies.
Her censored comment advocated for Palestinian human rights in the Israeli occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She noted that it was the Israeli government, not the occupied Palestinians, who were regularly committing acts of terrorism.
That particular political observation is no longer permitted by the Facebook censorship policies — which we all know are expanding rapidly.
It’s more evidence of the power of the pro-Israel lobby in this country which would love to censor ALL criticism of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinian people living under its control.
Fortunately, the Jewish-led, Palestinian rights organization called Jewish Voice for Peace has begun a campaign on Facebook aimed at combating the Israel Lobby’s dangerous, anti-first amendment influence online.
In January 2021, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced a global campaign “Facebook, we need to talk” about the social media giant’s inquiry into whether criticism of the movement Zionism “falls within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards.”
In its current form, the controversy centers around forcing universities, social media platforms, and other public spaces to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) standard which defines current anti-Semitism to include “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel, overall a definition that would essentially shut down any criticism of the Zionist state.
According to Lara Friedman, the goal of Zionist groups who are pushing for this action “isn’t to get Facebook to deplatform antisemitism, but to get Facebook to deplatform criticism of Israel.”
In response, hundreds of activists, intellectuals and artists from around the world have launched a petition to ensure that Facebook does not include “Zionist” as a protected category in its hate speech policy—“that is, to treat ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for “Jew or “Jewish.” In its first 24 hours, the open letter gathered over 14,500 signatures, including such figures as Hanan Ashrawi, Norita Cortiñas, Wallace Shawn and Peter Gabriel.
“Cooperating with the Israeli government’s request,” the petition notes, “would undermine efforts to dismantle antisemitism, deprive Palestinians of a crucial venue for expressing their political viewpoints to the world, and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for its violations of Palestinian rights.”
Juan Cole has a new article at his news site, Informed Comment, discussing
Professor Juan Cole
the recent decision by the International Criminal Court to investigate numerous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity made against Israel.
I examine these issues in my new book, tentatively titled, Like Birds in a Cage: How Bad Bible-Reading Leads Christian Zionists to Collaborate in Israeli War Crimes and Palestinian Suffering (Cascade, forthcoming).
Israel’s defensive public relations campaign is already in full swing, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others unleashing the now standard canard of accusing such investigations as expressions of antisemitic hatred.
This action by the ICC is an important first step that needed to happen years ago. What will come of it is anyone’s guess.
But I know this: Christians must stand on the side of justice and oppose all oppressors. That means that God’s people must stand with the Palestinian people while condemning Israeli racism and apartheid.
Here is professor Cole’s article:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Friday, the International Criminal Court found that it had jurisdiction to consider war crimes and crimes against humanity and the crime of Apartheid in the Palestinian territories.
Israeli politician Abba Eban once quipped that Palestinians never lost the opportunity to lose an opportunity. But Palestinians have carefully, methodically created this opportunity to be heard in an international tribunal. It is the ruling Israeli right wing about which one can now quip about missing opportunities.
Israel has egregiously violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of people in Occupied territories by flooding its own citizens into the Palestinian Territories, by stealing Palestinian land from its owners and building squatter settlements on it, and by using disproportional force against Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border.
The court will also look into war crimes by Hamas, which was elected in 2006 and retains control of the Gaza Strip.
It has been impossible for anyone to stop Israel’s repeated and serious crimes against the Palestinians because the United States backs them to the hilt and is deeply implicated itself in keeping Palestinians stateless. (The “two-state solution” long since became geographically impossible, and invoking it and an alleged “peace process,” as the Biden administration does, is just a way of keeping the Palestinians from enjoying any human rights).
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu cynically called the ruling “anti-Semitic,” in the ultimate debasement of a term that has otherwise been central to human rights struggles.
Filistin al-Yawm (Palestine Today) quotes Rami Abdu, head of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor as saying that the International Criminal Court announcement that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian Territories represents a victory, won by many sacrifices, for justice, freedom and ethical values in the world. It is, he said, the fruit of a Palestinian struggle that has lasted decades to win recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
As a result, he said, Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes from various generations will gain the right to seek justice after decades of occupation and to see the perpetrators tried in the Hague. He cautioned, however, that “The decision does not mean the end of the road, and the task will not be easy. The hope is that the Biden administration will adopt a different course from its predecessor, and will refrain from putting any pressure on the court.”
In spring of 2020, Trump declared a national emergency as a pretext for being able to target justices and staff of the International Criminal Court with sanctions because they were looking into alleged crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan. These outrageous and ineffectual sanctions have been lifted by the Biden administration.
The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute circulated to UN member states in the late 1990s and finalized in 2002. The United States and Israel refused to sign or to recognize the court’s jurisdiction. Some 123 countries have, however, ratified the treaty and so incorporated it into their national law.
The court can take up cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and Apartheid committed by officials in the signatory states. It can apply sanctions to individuals in those governments after trying them. It does not sanction states but individuals. So far its cases have been entirely from Africa.
But the court’s hands are usually tied with regard to non-signatory governments. It cannot move against their officials unless the United Nations Security Council forwards a case to them. Thus, when the murderous regime of Muammar Gaddafi attacked civilians in winter-spring of 2011 during the Arab Spring youth revolt, the Security Council referred the case to the ICC. Its justices considered evidence against Muammar Gaddafi and his son Saif Gaddafi, as well as interior minister Abdullah Sanusi. Arrest warrants were issued by the court for these individuals on June 27, 2011.
The State of Palestine led by Mahmoud Abbas had little hope of the US Security Council asking the ICC to look into Israeli war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, since the United States almost always uses its veto to protect Israeli officials from sanctions for their illegal occupation policies in the Palestinian Territories that they grabbed beginning in 1967.
The Palestinian David very carefully and with foresight therefore moved to join the International Criminal Court. The first obstacle they faced is that court members have to be members of the United Nations. Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the eclipse of Labor in favor of the far, far right Likud and its offshoots, Israel’s policy against the Palestinian people has been predicated on preventing Palestinians from ever having a state. They are to be kept stateless and deprived of the basic human rights that come with citizenship in a state.
In 2015, the state of Palestine (as the UN calls it) acceded to the International Criminal Court and recognized its jurisdiction in the Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem.
This is like three dimensional chess on the part of the Palestinians. Because they now have what is called in the law “standing.” They are a permanent observer state at the UN and they are signatories to the Rome Statute.
Now just one step was left, which was to take to the ICC those Israeli officials operating in the Palestinian Territories in such a way as to violate the Rome Statute. Palestine did not hurry to do so, hoping that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu would see the legal peril and become more reasonable. But Netanyahu kept stealing their land and urging Trump to cut their funding (which he did), and by 2019 the Palestinians concluded that they had nothing left to lose by filing a claim.
The ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, declared a delay while she sought reassurances that the court had jurisdiction over Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A little over a year later, she has been assured that it does, given the recognition of the Palestine Authority as the government of those region in the Oslo Accords.
As Mr. Abdu said, this step is more the beginning of something rather than its end. Netanyahu will attempt to obstruct the workings of the court. But this is a great day for the international rule of law, and all believers in human rights should rejoice.
The Las Vegas casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, died on January 11, 2021.
Donald Trump with Sheldon Adelson. Adelson reportedly contributed $75 million to Trump’s 2019 reelection campaign.
Adelson (and his Israeli born wife) was a fanatical political Zionist who, sadly, was the living embodiment of the old antisemitic slander that Jews all secretly loved Israel more than their country of residence.
Occasionally, caricatures — even slanderous caricatures — can be true.
Israeli apartheid is not limited to the Occupied Territories.
Apartheid reigns within Israel’s recognized borders as well.
Israel is NOT “the only democracy in the Middle East” because Israel is not a democracy.
As I show in my forthcoming book exposing the many errors of Christian Zionism, Israel is actually an extremely rigid ethnocracy. That is, a hierarchical state where one ethnic group (Jews) exercises the legal privilege of systematically discriminating against everyone else in the state (primarily Palestinians).
This is much more than a story about Adelson’s control over the Republican party. It is an expose in how big money donors, CEOs, and corporations are able to control American politics, including our foreign policy.
Below is an excerpt from Kane’s article, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:
WITH THEdeath of 87-year-old billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party has lost its biggest benefactor.
A Palestinian girl sits inside a room of her family’s building which was damaged by Israel’s bombing attack in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, Feb. 23, 2015. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Adelson’s legacy, however, will live on for generations, not only in his Israeli-born wife Miriam, who is expected to continue giving millions of dollars to the Republican Party, but in the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Adelson’s top concern. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” Adelson said in 2017.
More than anyone else, Adelson can claim credit for transforming the GOP into a party devoted to bolstering Israel’s military occupation and its expansion of West Bank settlements. And the Israeli
Israeli settlers regularly harass and attack Palestinians. They are typically protected by Israeli soldiers.
right, also bankrolled by Adelson, saw many of its political aspirations realized under Donald Trump’s presidency, a political turn that has fractured the long-standing bipartisan consensus on the Jewish state.
Adelson’s most important political conviction was that the Israeli right must be supported. The 19th-richest American used his $35 billion fortune to ensure that the GOP’s policy goals united with the Israeli right’s. In a 2010 speech, Adelson, a U.S. Army veteran, lamented that “the uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.” He added: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” he said in remarks made in 2014 at an Israeli-American Council conference. During that same appearance, Adelson dismissed concerns about whether Israeli democracy can coexist while Israel rules millions of Palestinians who have no voting rights. So Israel won’t be a democratic state, so what?” he said. . .
. . . FROM 2008 TO 2016, Adelson opposed President Barack Obama at every turn, backing John McCain and Mitt Romney’s failed attempts at defeating him and bankrolling the groups that fiercely wanted to defeat Obama’s Iran policies. In 2013, Adelson suggested that Obama launch a nuclear strike on Iran. Obama instead pursued his landmark nuclear deal with Iran, which he sealed in 2015.
But Adelson’s crowning achievements were yet to come. During the 2016
Israel’s Apartheid/ Annexation wall. As you see, the wall did not stop suicide bombers from entering Israel.
presidential primary, after all the GOP candidates traipsed to Las Vegas to meet with the casino magnate as part of what’s known as the “Adelson primary,” Adelson appeared to back Sen. Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk thought to be a top contender for winning the nomination. The casino magnate was said to be wary of Trump, who had demurred on whether he backed Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital in a speech to the Adelson-backed Republican Jewish Coalition. For his part, Trump, in October 2015, mocked Rubio for being Adelson’s “perfect little puppet.”
. . . Adelson wanted Trump to torpedo diplomacy with Iran; Trump backed out of the Iran deal in May 2018. Adelson believed the U.S. Embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; Trump did so, also in May 2018. (In September 2020, Adelson bought the U.S ambassador’s beach-view residence in the affluent Israeli city of Herzliya near Tel Aviv for $67 million, ensuring that the next U.S. ambassador won’t have a place to live near the old location of the U.S. Embassy.) Adelson wanted the U.S. to legitimize Israel’s policy of building settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem; Trump did so in January 2019, reversing long-standing bipartisan U.S. policy that saw settlements as illegitimate obstacles to peace because they make a geographically viable Palestinian state impossible.
Gideon Levy, intrepid Israeli journalist for Haaretz newspaper
Gideon Levy is one of the bravest and most honest journalists in Israel. He writes for the daily newspaper Haaretz. Here is his most recent article on the Israeli army and its brutal treatment of Palestinian children.
I have visited the Al-Arroub refugee camp and spent a pleasant afternoon with a family there. All three sons had been arrested, beaten by Israeli soldiers. One had been shot. All for no particular reason:
Last week, we were in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, searching for an open area in which to sit, for fear of the coronavirus. There wasn’t one. In a camp in which house touches house, whose alleys are the width of a man and strewn with garbage, there’s nowhere to sit outside. One can only dream of a garden or a bench; there isn’t even a sidewalk. This is where Basel al-Badawi lives. A year ago, soldiers shot his brother dead, before his eyes, for no reason. Two weeks ago, Basel was snatched from his bed on a cold night and taken, barefoot, for questioning. We sat in his family’s cramped home and realized there was no “out” to go to. While we were there, Israeli soldiers blocked the entrance to the camp, as they occasionally do, arbitrarily, and the sense of suffocation only grew.
Basel Al Badawi in his home, with photo of Omar hanging on the wall, in Al Arroub refugee camp, November 2020. Credit: Alex Levac
This is Basel’s world and this is his reality. He is 16, a bereaved brother, who was abducted from his bed in the dark of night by soldiers. He has nowhere to go to except for school, which is closed for part of the week due to COVID-19. Basel is free now, more fortunate than certain other children and teenagers. Around 170 of them are currently detained in Israel. Other children are shot by soldiers, wounded and sometimes killed, with no distinction made between children and adults – a Palestinian is a Palestinian – or between a life-threatening situation and a “public disturbance.”
On Friday they killed Ali Abu Alia, a 13-year-old boy. It was a lethal shot to the abdomen. No one could remain indifferent to the sight of his innocent face in photographs, and his last picture – in a shroud, his face exposed, his eyes closed, as he was carried to burial in his village. Ali, as he did every week, went with his friends to demonstrate against the wild and violent outposts that sprouted out of the settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, taking over the remaining land of his village, al-Mughayir. There is nothing more just than the struggle of this village, there is nothing more heinous than the use of lethal force against protesters and there is no possibility that shooting Ali in the abdomen could have been justifiable. In Israel, of course, no one showed any interest over the weekend in the death of a child, one more child.
Mourners carry the body of Palestinian teenager Ali Abu Alia during his funeral in the village of Mughayir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on December 5, 2020. Credit: ABBAS MOMANI/AFP
Up until the current school year, around 50 children from the shepherding community of Ras a-Tin studied at the school in al-Mughayir, the village of the deceased boy. They had to walk about 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) each day, round trip, to attend. This year their parents, with the help of a European Commission aid organization based in Italy, built them a modest, charming school in the village. Israel’s Civil Administration is threatening to demolish it, and in the meantime it is harassing the pupils and teachers with surprise visits to check whether the toilets had been, God forbid, connected to a water pipe – in a village that was never connected to the power grid or the water supply. The children of Ras a-Tin must have known Ali, their former classmate, now dead.
The children did not know Malek Issa, of Isawiyah, in East Jerusalem. The 9-year-old boy lost an eye after it was hit by a sponge-tipped bullet fired by an Israeli police officer. On Thursday the Justice Ministry department that examines allegations of police misconduct announced that no one would be charged in the shooting, after 10 months of intensive investigation. It was enough for the policemen involved to claim that stones had been thrown at them, perhaps one of them hit the boy. But no video shows stones being thrown, nor is there any other evidence of this. Ali’s killers can also sleep in peace: No one will prosecute them. All they did was to kill a Palestinian child.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy who was wounded in Isawiyah at Hadassah Ein-Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem, on February 18, 2020.Credit: Ohad Ziegenberg
These and many other incidents are taking place during a period that is among the quietest in the West Bank. This is the terror taking place, committed by the state. When we hear of such incidents in vicious dictatorships – children who are snatched from their beds in the middle of the night, one boy who was shot in the eye, another who was shot and killed – it sends shivers down our spine. Shooting at demonstrators? At children? Where do such things happen? Not in some faraway land, but rather just an hour’s drive from your home; not in some dark regime, but in the only democracy.
What would you think of a regime that allows the shooting of children, that abducts them in their sleep and razes their schools? That’s exactly what you must think of the regime here in our country [Israel].
Below is a 2 minute video showing Israeli soldiers randomly firing tear gas and rubber bullets in a West Bank Palestinian neighborhood.
I have witnessed and photographed identical behavior many times. I have also watched a video filmed by one of my friends showing Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas onto a neighborhood playground, causing little children, mothers, and grandmothers to flee.
The soldiers do not need “a reason” for doing these things. Their only reason is the fact that Palestinians are not Jews (even though there are Arab Jews in Israel called Mizrahis).
The fact that Palestinians dare to live on land that the Zionists want for themselves is all the reason Israel needs for making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible.
The Israeli army calls it “the searing of consciousness.” It’s similar to the torture techniques used by the CIA to reduce detainees to a state of “learned helplessness.”
Israel’s theory is that, eventually, the entire Palestinian population will learn that resistance is futile. They will learn to always do exactly as they are told; or, better yet, move somewhere else so that Israel can take all of their property without a struggle.
Those of you who follow Israeli politics know that they recently held their third national election in less than a year. And once again Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the numerous legal indictments against him, is again in the top position to form the new government.
Despite its frequent claims to being the only democracy in the Middle East,
Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy
Israeli-Palestinians still confront an all pervasive Zionist system of Jim Crow laws that suppress Palestinian involvement in government.
Twenty-first century Israel is the Middle Eastern equivalent of Louisiana, Alabama,Georgia, and Mississippi in the early nineteen-hundreds. Palestinians are Israel’s “Negroes.”
Israeli Zionism is the ideological equivalent of the white supremacy, baptized with Christian lingo and accouterments, so idolized by the southern Klansmen who burned crosses to terrorize anyone who forgot “their place.”
Gideon Levy is an opinion writer for the Israeli, daily newspaper, Haaretz. His is a rare voice speaking the truth about anti-Palestinian racism in his homeland. Levy’s recent analysis of the Israeli elections is entitled, “In Israel, Zionism is a Religion, And It’s Mandatory.” (Note: the joint list is an alliance of the majority-Palestinian parties in Israel.)
Here is an excerpt:
“Voting for a party that doesn’t have the Zionist banner flying over it is a painful, almost impossible step. That’s the result of 100 years of indoctrination that is practically unmatched. With the exception of North Korea, no other country has such a ruling ideology that is not to be doubted or deviated from. Aside from Iran, no other country has a mandatory religion. In Israel, Zionism is a religion, and it is mandatory.
“A Jew who votes for the Joint List is still considered a traitor, or at least a person who has some kind of screw loose. In our childhood, this is how we viewed activists from Rakah and Matzpen, and we shunned them like lepers. The Rakah office on Maza Street in Tel Aviv was like a mysterious, menacing headquarters of an enemy army. You didn’t want to be seen anywhere near it. I remember the first time I went there: I was terrified.
“These were the adolescent growing pains of a young country. But when a strong, thriving country disqualifies a legal ideology and makes it illegitimate, something has gone wrong with its democracy.
“Zionism is a worldview like any other. One can see its attractive and unattractive sides. It is not a religion in which doubters are denounced as heretics – yet it is forbidden to reject Zionism. Why? Because Zionism is not sure of itself. It knows that it brought a catastrophe upon another people and it knows that the fire of evil and injustice is burning beneath the carpet upon which it treads. If Zionism were certain of its righteousness, it would put itself to the test like any other worldview and it would be permissible to doubt it. Israel in 2020 is not yet ready for that. A true left will only arise here when we wean ourselves of the addiction to Zionism and free ourselves from its chains.”
families from their homes in the East Jerusalem area called Sheikh Jarrah. East Jerusalem, including the Old City of Jerusalem, is part of the occupied West Bank.
Imagine an Irish-American organization sending its “settlers” into what are now Jewish neighborhoods in New York City. They pass through the streets knocking on doors announcing, “This property used to be owned by Irish people. Get out.”
illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.
artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.
a democracy.
As for the Palestinians, Adelson saw them as an invented nation and nothing more than a political obstacle. “The purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel,” 
