The Longer Israel Attacks a Defenceless People the More Its Support Drains Away
There was a massive rally at the Clocktower in Brighton
today and then an even larger march, with over a thousand people taking part,
to the Level in Brighton. Here are some
photographs and videos.
Once again it shows that Brighton is the capital of
the anti-Zionist and Palestinian struggle in Britain! Well the Zionists claim we are the anti-Semitic
capital but we know what Zionists mean when they say ‘anti-Semitism’.
Also I am including a wonderful video made by the journalist
Abby Martin in Gaza describing life under siege in Gaza.
And below that I include an article on the other
aspect of what is happening in Israel itself. For the first time since the
beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000 Israel’s Palestinian population have
mobilised in support of the struggle against the occupation and in particular the
desecration by Israeli police thugs of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
This has been met with vigilante squads of Israeli fascists
attacking Israeli Palestinians in their homes, including burning down mosques
and Palestinian shops. This vigilante violence,
although condemned by Israeli politicians has been supported if not encouraged by the Israeli police who have stood by
as Palestinians have been lynched and dragged out of their cars.
Let us remember that the Zionist movement can trace
its origins to the pogroms against Jews in Odessa in 1881. Zionism has now
decided to replicate the actions of the anti-Semites with its own pogroms
against Palestinians. That is some achievement.
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It demonstrates that racism and fascism is not genetic
or peculiar to any people or group.
Given the right set of circumstances any people can become racists and
murderers and that is Zionism’s achievement in its ‘Jewish’ state.
News has also come in of Italian Dockers Refusing to Load Arms Shipment to Israel in Solidarity with Palestine
Jerusalem
protests: The mob ‘breaking faces’ learned from Israel’s establishment
4 May 2021
A
quarter of Israeli Jews recognise their rule over Palestinians as ‘apartheid’.
The question is whether they think that’s a bad thing
Jonathan Cook
Middle East Eye – 4 May 2021
Inside the Israeli parliament and out on the streets of Jerusalem, the
forces of unapologetic Jewish supremacism are stirring, as a growing section of
Israel’s youth tire of the two-faced Jewish nationalism that has held sway in
Israel for decades.
Last week, Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism
faction, a vital partner if caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands
any hope of forming a new government, issued a barely veiled threat to Israel’s
large Palestinian minority.
Expulsion, he suggested, was looming for these 1.8 million Palestinians,
a fifth of the Israeli population who enjoy very degraded citizenship. “Arabs
are citizens of Israel – for now at least,” he told his party. “And
they have representatives at the Knesset [Israeli parliament] – for now at
least.” For good measure, he referred to Palestinian legislators – the elected
representatives of Israel’s Palestinian minority – as “our enemies sitting in the Knesset”.
Smotrich’s brand of brazen Jewish racism is on the rise, after his
faction won six mandates in the 120-member parliament in March. One of those
seats is for Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the neo-fascist Jewish Power
party.
Ben Gvir’s supporters are now in a bullish mood. Last month, they took to
the streets around the occupied Old City of Jerusalem, chanting “Death to
Arabs” and making good on promises in WhatsApp chats to attack Palestinians and “break their faces”.
For days, these Jewish gangs of mostly youngsters have brought the
lawless violence that has long reigned largely out of sight in the hills of the
occupied West Bank into central Jerusalem. This time, their attacks haven’t
been captured in shaky, out-of-focus YouTube videos. They have been shown on
prime-time Israeli TV.
Equally significant, these Jewish mobs have carried out their rampages
during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Arson attacks
The visibility and premeditation of this gang violence has
discomfited many Israelis. But in the process, they have been given a close-up
view of how appealing the violent, anti-Arab doctrines of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane – the
ideological inspiration behind Jewish Power – are proving with a significant
section of young Jews in Israel.
One, sporting a “Kahane was right”
badge, spoke for her peers as she was questioned on Israeli TV about the noisy
chants of “May your village burn down” – a reference to so-called “price-tag”
arson attacks committed by the Israeli far-right against
Palestinian communities in the occupied territories and inside Israel.
Olive groves, mosques, cars and homes are regularly torched by these Jewish extremists, who claim Palestinian lands as their
exclusive biblical birthright.
The woman responded
in terms she obviously thought conciliatory:
“I
don’t say that it [a Palestinian village] should burn down, but that you should
leave the village and we’ll go live in it.”
She and others now sound impatient to bring forward the day when
Palestinians must “leave”.
Machinery of oppression
These sentiments – in the parliament and out on the streets – have not
emerged out of nowhere. They are as old as Zionism itself, when Israel’s first
leaders oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from most of their
homeland in 1948, in an act of mass dispossession Palestinians called their Nakba (catastrophe).
Violence to remove Palestinians has continued to be at the core of the
Jewish state-building project ever since. The rationale for the gangs beating
up Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem are the actions pursued more
bureaucratically by the Israeli state: its security forces, occupation
administrators and courts.
Last week, that machinery of oppression came under detailed scrutiny in a
213-page report from Human Rights Watch. The leading international human rights
group declared that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, as set out in international law.
It argued that Israel had met the three conditions of apartheid in the crime of Ramadan,Meir Kahane Nakba East
Jerusalem Human Rights Watch apartheid,Rome Statute: the domination
of one racial group over another, systematic oppression of the marginalised
group, and inhumane acts. Those acts include forcible transfer, expropriation of landed
property, the creation of separate reserves and ghettos, denial of the right to
leave and return to their country, and denial of the right to a nationality.
Only one such act is needed to qualify as the crime of apartheid but, as
Human Rights Watch makes clear, Israel is guilty of them all.
Dragged out of bed
What Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have been
documenting is equally visible to the gangs roaming Jerusalem. Israel’s
official actions share a common purpose, one that sends a clear message to
these youngsters about what the state – and Israel’s national ideology of
Zionism – aims to achieve.
They see Palestinian land reclassified as Jewish “state land” and the
constant expansion of settlements that violate international law. They see
Palestinians denied permits to build homes in their own villages. They see orders issued
to demolish Palestinian homes, or even entire
communities. And they see Palestinian families torn apart as couples, or their children, are
refused the right to live together.
Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinians with impunity,
and drag Palestinian children out of bed
in the middle of the night. They man checkpoints throughout the occupied West
Bank, restricting the movement of Palestinians. They fire on, or “arrest”,
Palestinians trying to seek work outside the closed-off ghettos Israel has imposed
on them. And soldiers stand guard, or assist, as settlers run amok, attacking
Palestinians in their homes and fields.
All of this is invariably rubber-stamped as “legal” by the Israeli courts. Is it any
surprise, then, that growing numbers of Israeli teenagers question why all
these military, legal and administrative formalities are really necessary? Why
not just beat up Palestinians and “break their faces” until they get the
message that they must leave?
Uppity natives
The battlefront in Jerusalem in recent days – characterised misleadingly
in most media as the site of “clashes” – has been the sunken plaza in front of
Damascus Gate, a major entrance to the walled Old City and the Muslim and
Christian holy places that lie within.
The gate is possibly the last prominent public space Palestinians can
still claim as theirs in central Jerusalem, after decades in which Israeli
occupation authorities have gradually encircled and besieged their
neighbourhoods, severing them from the Old City. During Ramadan, Damascus Gate
serves as a popular communal site for Palestinians to congregate in the
evenings after the daytime fast.
It was Israeli police who triggered the current explosive mood in
Jerusalem by erecting barriers at Damascus Gate to seal the area off at the start of Ramadan. The pretext was
to prevent overcrowding, but – given their long experience of occupation –
Palestinians understood the barriers as another “temporary” measure that
quickly becomes permanent, making it ever harder for them to access the Old
City and their holy sites. Other major gates to the occupied Old City have already been
effectively “Judaised”.
The decision of Israeli police to erect barriers cannot be divorced from
a bigger context for Palestinians: the continuing efforts by Israeli
authorities to evict them from areas around the Old City. In recent weeks,
fresh waves of armed Jewish settlers have been moving into Silwan, a Palestinian community in
the shadow of al-Aqsa Mosque. They have done so as Israel prepares to raze an
entire Palestinian neighbourhood there, using its absolute control over planning issues.
Similarly, the Israeli courts have approved the eviction of Palestinians
in Sheikh Jarrah, another neighbourhood under belligerent occupation close to
the Old City that has been subjected to a long-running, state-backed campaign by Jewish settlers to take it over. Last month,
Jerusalem officials added insult to injury by approving a plan to build a memorial to fallen Israeli soldiers in the midst of the
Palestinian community.
The decision to close off the Damascus Gate area was therefore bound to
provoke resistance from Palestinians, who fought police to take down the
barriers. Police responded with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannon.
Those scenes – of uppity natives refusing to be disappeared back into
their homes – were part of the trigger that brought the Jewish gangs out onto
the streets in a show of force. Police largely let the mob rampage, as youths threw stones and bottles and attacked
Palestinians.
Tired of half measures
The sight of Jewish gangs roaming central Jerusalem to hurt Palestinians
has been described as a “pogrom” by some progressive US Jewish
groups. But the difference between the far-right and the Israeli state in
implementing their respective violent agendas is more apparent than real.
Smotrich, Ben Gvir and these street gangs are tired of the half-measures,
procrastination and moral posturing by Israeli elites who have hampered efforts
to “finish the job”: clearing the native Palestinian population off their lands
once and for all.
Whereas Israeli politicians on the left and right have rationalised their
ugly, racist actions on the pretext of catch-all “security” measures, the
far-right has no need for the international community’s approval. They are
impatient for a conclusion to more than seven decades of ethnic cleansing.
And the ranks of the far-right are likely to swell further as it attracts
ever-larger numbers of a new generation of the ultra-Orthodox community, the fastest-growing section of Israel’s Jewish population. For
the first time, nationalist youths from the Haredi community are turning their backs on a more cautious rabbinical
leadership.
And while the violence in Jerusalem has subsided for the moment, the
worst is unlikely to be over. The final days of Ramadan coincide this year with
the notorious Jerusalem Day parade, an annual ritual in which Jewish
ultra-nationalists march through the besieged Palestinian streets of the Old
City chanting threats to Palestinians and attacking any who dare to venture out.
Turning a blind eye
Human Right Watch’s detailed report concludes that western states, by turning a blind
eye to Israel’s long-standing abuses of Palestinians and focusing instead on a
non-existent peace process, have allowed “apartheid to metastasize and
consolidate”.
Its findings echo those of B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights
organisation. In January, it too declared Israel to be an apartheid regime in the occupied territories and inside
Israel, towards its own Palestinian citizens.
Despite the reluctance of US and European politicians and media to talk
about Israel in these terms, a new survey by B’Tselem shows that one in four Israeli
Jews accept “apartheid” as an accurate description of Israel’s rule over
Palestinians. What is far less clear is how many of them believe apartheid, in
the Israeli context, is a good thing.
Another finding in the survey offers a clue. When asked about recent talk
from Israeli leaders about annexing the West Bank, two-thirds of Israeli Jews
reject the idea that Jews and Palestinians should have equal rights in those
circumstances.
The mob in Jerusalem is happy to enforce Israel’s apartheid now, in hopes of speeding up the process of expulsion. Other Israelis are still in denial. They prefer to pretend that apartheid has not yet arrived, in hopes of easing their consciences a little longer.
