Annual Pogrom in Jerusalem as Thousands of Settlers march chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’, ‘May Your Villages Burn’ and ‘A Jew is a Soul, an Arab is a Whore’

YouTube Collude with Zionism's Genocidal Racism By Deleting Videos of Their Crimes Under Hate Speech Policies

Pogrom against Palestinians by Jewish Settlers Jerusalem Day 29 May

Last Thursday 18 May the annual ritual of thousands of settlers being herded and protected by the Israeli Police through Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem took place. They chanted a variety of racist slogans, such as the delightful ‘Death to the Arabs’ whilst attacking any Palestinian they could lay their hands on.

It was an Israeli Labor government that instituted Jerusalem Day in 1968 as an assertion of Jewish Supremacy over Arab Jerusalem.

Last year it was Security Minister Omar Bar Lev, a member of the Israeli Labor Party, who gave authorisation to the Flag March and the inevitable pogrom through East Jerusalem.

You will remember that the Israeli Labor Party was part of the so-called Government of Change with Benny Gantz, who outlawed 6 Palestinian Human Rights groups at the stroke of a pen, including the highly dangerous Defence for Children International – Palestine. Whatever else it was the Change Government represented no change for Palestinians.

This year the march was led by Israel’s Police Minister, the neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of Otzma Yehudit, Jewish Power. In the West the very term ‘Jewish Power’ is considered an anti-Semitic phrase but not in Israel where it is a reality.

Even Moshe Yalon, the right-wing former Likud Defence Minister has characterised Ben Gvir as ‘Mein Kampf in reverse’ but the yellow press and the craven BBC cannot bring themselves to describe in simple words the record of Gvir, who had on his living room wall until recently the picture of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994. This is what Zionism has evolved into.

Bogi Yaalon, "Mein Kampf," reversed and Jewish Supremacy ideology infiltrated the government

Western Hypocrisy

Just imagine what the BBC and the British press would say if in Iran, which has the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel, some 25,000, thousands of  Muslims were to march through the Jewish parts of Tehran chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.

You would have every talking head in the media condemning this in no uncertain words and talking of a second holocaust yet when it comes to the equivalent behaviour by Israeli Jewish settlers and their government supporters, there is absolute silence – not just by the British media but the New York Times, Washington Post and the rest of the prostitute press in the West.

Indeed last year we had the spectacle of the BBC’s disgusting racist, their correspondent in Israel, Yolande Knell, reporting that the pogrom through East Jerusalem was a ‘festive’ event. ‘It feels like a party’ this creature twittered into a microphone.

there are just thousands upon thousands of young Israelis like this that I’ve seen around the city the mood of them is really jubilant, it’s festive, it feels like a party.

As I wrote at the time:

‘One wonders what Yolande would have made of the Nazi pogrom Kristallnacht in November 1938. Perhaps she would have been caught up in the enthusiasm of the Nazis’ Sturmabteilung (SA) as they burnt Jewish synagogues and smashed Jewish shop windows, declaring that

there are just thousands upon thousands of young Germans. The mood of them is really jubilant, it’s festive, it feels like a party.

BBC Reporter Yolande Knell reporting on the Zionist pogrom on Jerusalem Day May 2022

But it’s not just the BBC and the British press who ignore Israel’s pogromists. The social media companies do their bit to help keep people in ignorance.

At 1.02 in the morning of 13 May I received notice from Youtube that they were taking down the video below

Jerusalem Day Demonstration by Settlers - Shireen is a Whore because ‘ we think it violates our hate speech policy.’ They went on to justify their crass decision because ‘it's important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all.’

However I was informed that ‘If you think we've made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look.’

Now I have had experience of this kind of thing before. Not so long they took down a similar video. On that occasion it was a group of Israeli right-wingers shouting at Jewish demonstrators against house demolitions in Sheikh Jarrar in Jerusalem that ‘Hitler was right’ and telling them that they should have died in Auschwitz.

Despite me telling them that far from advocating what was in the video I was exposing the Zionists as the racists and fascists that they were Youtube turned down my appeal. I could have saved my breath because Youtube aren’t interested in exposing Zionist and Israeli racism. Their sole interest was in preventing the exposure of racism –all under the rubric of ‘hate speech’! 

In reality Youtube’s ‘hate speech’ policy is a policy to protect hate speech.  This is Youtube's commitment to anti-racism. We should not be surprised since Google is developing artificial intelligence software for use by Israel’s military for the purposes of surveillance. So I had no illusions in their ‘appeal procedure’ which is in reality a rubber stamping procedure.

In my appeal I said:

Are you stupid?  Do you deliberately conflate EXPOSING racism with ADVOCATING racism?

The video 'Jerusalem Day Demonstration by Settlers-Shireen is a Whore' doesn't support pogroms against the Palestinians by Jewish settlers but OPPOSES their racism.

Are you really that stupid?  Can you not tell the difference between exposing racism and supporting it?  

Let us assume you are not that stupid, which is possible. Then there is only one conclusion to be drawn from your removing this video and that is that you want to protect the very racists that I am exposing. In which case it is YOU not me who is guilty of breaching your 'hate speech guidelines'

In which case the disgusting hate mongers and racists are the morons who removed this video who do not even have the honesty to admit to their racism

Suffice to say this appeal did not succeed, thus proving that the Youtube Moderators are indeed racist scum.

Below is an excellent article on Mondoweiss by Mariam Barghouti about the political implications of Jerusalem’s annual flag march.

The Flag March is part of the Zionist war on Jerusalem

The Flag March represents the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the imposition of Israeli colonial dominance over Jerusalem. It is part of the Zionist forever war on Jerusalem.

By Mariam Barghouti May 22, 2023

On Thursday, May 18, Israeli settler groups held the annual “Flag March” in Jerusalem. The march, or the “dance of flags,” was first inaugurated in 1968, a year after Israeli forces occupied East Jerusalem and took over Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai. Israeli officials such as the National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich joined this year’s march, both members of the new far-right Israeli coalition.

In what the Israeli state calls “Jerusalem Day,” the Flag March signals a settler emphasis on the “reunification of Jerusalem.” However, as Palestinians insistent on remaining in their homes, from Sheikh Jarrah, to the Old City, and to neighboring towns in East Jerusalem, the Flag March has become an attempt to drive out the last remaining Palestinians from Jerusalem.

In a statement, the spokesperson for the Palestinian presidential office, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, warned that the Flag March could lead to an “explosion,” with tensions already high amidst Israel’s increased violence in Jerusalem. In a statement to the press, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, condemned the march as an attempt to consolidate the Judaization and conquest of Jerusalem further, emphasizing that “the Palestinians will continue to confront the policies of the occupation, no matter how heavy the price.”

However, for Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Flag March is not only a political and military move meant to solidify Israel’s stranglehold over Jerusalem but is a day of guaranteed violence and settler abuse.

The backdrop

The ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem began in 1948 with the massacres committed in Deir Yassin, Ein Karem, Abu Ghosh, and other towns surrounding Jerusalem. The military annexation of East Jerusalem began in 1967, and the judicial solidification of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel took effect on July 30, 1980. That summer, the Jerusalem Law was added to the Israeli Basic Law (a set of Israeli laws adopted in lieu of a constitution). The law declared Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as the capital of Israel. This further allowed the Israeli government to expand its jurisdiction over Palestinian lives in the city. This also violated international law and the internationally recognized status of East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory. It is what laid the foundation for sparking the First Intifada of 1987. In December 2000, less than a year after the eruption of the Second Intifada, the Israeli Knesset made another amendment to the Jerusalem Law affirming sole Israeli power and jurisdiction over the city.

“Since the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967,” the website of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reads,

 “the city has become a haven for coexistence and revitalized religious and cultural expression for all faiths. Freedom of worship at all holy sites is guaranteed for the faithful of all three monotheistic religions, the first time in modern history that this has been the case.”

For Palestinians, this so-called “coexistence” has meant surviving the draconian policies of Israeli authorities known for persecuting Palestinians, enforcing apartheid, and committing crimes against humanity. 

Recent Jerusalem escalations

The settler Flag March should be viewed within the context of an escalatory dynamic particular to Jerusalem, in which rightwing settler groups and the Israeli state have attempted to progressively shrink Palestinian rights to the city while expanding Israeli colonial encroachment into Palestinian spaces. This process of encirclement has not only included the takeover of homes in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah or restrictions in areas like Silwan but has also extended to restricting religious and worshiping rights. This has led to chronic and repeated flare-ups in the Old City and local and regional tensions intensifying.

In the first three months of this year, more than a dozen settler attacks were recorded against churches in Jerusalem, while police violations against Muslim worshippers and the systemic targeting of youth in the Old City intensified compared to previous years

On April 15, Israeli forces denied Palestinian Christians from participating in Easter worship by banning them from entry into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and beating them. “The occupation, through such policies, claims that Jerusalem is theirs,” Archbishop Atallah Hanna told Mondoweiss following the police attack on the Church of Holy Sepulchre during Easter.

Just ten days before that, Israeli forces invaded the third holiest site in Islam, the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the heart of the Old City, attacking and assaulting peaceful worshippers while they prayed. Hundreds of worshippers were arrested during the month of Ramadan, as almost 47 worshippers from the West Bank were arrested and held in detention for days and exposed to mistreatment and abuse by Israeli police, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to Mondoweiss. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settlers have carried out arson attacks against Palestinian towns and villages, described even by the Israeli military as pogroms.

The “reunification of Jerusalem” celebrated by the Flag March therefore represents the Zionist promise for the ethnic cleansing to which the Palestinians of Jerusalem have been subjected since 1967, what the Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau has called the “Zionist forever war on Jerusalem.” 

This war has taken on many forms and has passed through several iterations. In 2017, Israeli policymakers attempted to mute the call to prayer for Muslim worshippers in Jerusalem and to set up metal detectors outside the entrance to the Aqsa compound, which resulted in the Bab al-Asbat uprising; in 2020, Israeli police and authorities began targeting bread bakeries in Jerusalem, noting that Jerusalem’s ka’ak bread is an emblem of Palestinian presence and identification in Jerusalem; in May 2021, settlers invaded the Aqsa compound, and again in April 2022, resulting in the beating and arrests of hundreds in both years.

Every year since May 1968, Palestinians in Jerusalem have had to fight for their homes and the right to assembly and freedom of worship. For Palestinians, the Flag March means surviving the violence of the Israeli state and its settlers yearly and refusing to be ethnically cleansed.

Israeli Police prepare for the closure of Old City of Jerusalem for the Flag March near the Chain Gate entrance, May 18, 2023. (Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

Holding a city captive

“[The first time I remember the Flag March] was around ten years ago,” Israa Abu Ahmad, a 29-year-old mother of two, told Mondoweiss on the day of this year’s march on May 18. “My sister was young, maybe 12 or 13, and was filming during the Flag March,” Abu Ahmad continued. “The [Israeli armed forces] then began to beat her, beat her a lot. She was a child.”

Incidents of the kind suffered by Israa are the norm for Palestinians in the Old City during the annual march. While Israelis prepare for ease of movement through the alleyways of the Old City and the streets of larger Jerusalem, Palestinians are herded through metal pathways erected around the city to ensure every Palestinian step is controlled and directed. Like most Palestinian residents of the Old City and its surrounding areas, Israa had to remain home with her children, fearing the likely violence from settlers.

“It’s as though we keep the children in a prison.”

Israa Abu Ahmad

In anticipation of settler and police violence, medical personnel and journalists were present around the city throughout the day to respond to and document developments. At approximately 3:00 p.m., before the march began, Israeli border police began manhandling, assaulting, and impeding medical staff in the area, according to on-the-ground documentation by Mondoweiss. According to reporters on the ground, several journalists were also attacked throughout the day.

Israeli Police obstruct medical personnel from moving around the Old City, Damascus Gate entrance, May 18, 2023. (Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

For the majority of the day, Palestinians were forced to remain inside their homes. Even children were denied the space to play. “I have my children here inside. It’s so hard to keep children locked in the house for 24 hours,” Israa told Mondoweiss. “It’s as though we keep [the children] in a prison.”

“I can’t play outside today, because they will hit me,” Rafeef Abu Ahmad, Israa’s 6-year-old daughter, told Mondoweiss. 

At that moment, banging was heard outside the house. “Do you see how [settlers] are beating?” Rafeef said, referring to the Jewish-Israeli youth rampaging outside her home near the Aqba Khaldiyeh area of the Old City. 

Just moments earlier, the 6-year-old had witnessed a mob of at least 15 Jewish settlers gathered around a man in her neighborhood, kicking him in the abdomen and continuing to beat him in a circle in what can only be described as an attempted lynching. Three Israeli police officers were on the scene, refusing to arrest the Jewish youth that assaulted the man and instead allowing them to continue on their rampage through the city. 

“In a previous Flag March, my shoulder was broken and, at the time my son was asleep by the window near my aunt’s house,” Israa continued, narrating the different years and forms of violence she and her family witnessed. 

“Settlers started to come out with liquor bottles across the windows and I was afraid for my son, so I went to him and carried him,” she told Mondoweiss. “By carrying my son, the bones in my shoulder broke to pieces. I had to do surgery and get platinum implants.” Israa’s son was nearly two years old at the time.

The impact this has on Palestinian Jerusalemites is also economic. These restrictions, especially during the Flag March, have forced Palestinians to close their shops early to make way for the rampaging settlers. Israa is one of them. “We closed all our shops today. I sew, and I have work. Today I closed the shop because I’m afraid they’ll attack,” she told Mondoweiss.

The day before the march on Wednesday, May 17, the Israeli police sent text messages to Palestinian residents of the Old City and shop owners, signed by the captain of the Israeli public police in the Jerusalem area, Shadi Basis. 

“Tomorrow will be the Flag March for the reunification of Jerusalem, from Damascus Gate on Waad St. to the Wailing Wall. Please take out all your cars and vehicles until 3 p.m., and shop and grocery owners must close at 3:00 p.m. Please adhere in order to obstruct collision and harm,”

Fear to document

The impact of this constant assault on Palestinian existence goes beyond the economic. It becomes an instrument of silencing Palestinians and punishing those who resist.

“We are not as strong as them, so we’re afraid,” a shop-owner in the Old City, who requested to remain anonymous, told Mondoweiss. “If the police ask us for something and we don’t do it, we become targets,” he said. “We’re afraid to have our voices recorded because of the threat that [Israeli police] will carry out revenge acts in different ways.”

“We are living in terror inside the city.”

Um Abed, shop owner

The fear witnessed in individuals and families approached by Mondoweiss for recorded interviews highlights the ways in which Israel punishes exposure. At least a dozen shop owners and residents in the city explicitly informed Mondoweiss they were afraid of repercussions from the Police if they spoke out.

“We are living in terror inside the city,” Umm Abed, a resident of the Old City and small shop owner, explained to Mondoweiss on Thursday morning, as preparations for the march ensued. “But the residents of the city cannot take this on. The youth are being banned from Aqsa, and they are either arrested or denied entry.”

“All the years that have passed are a series of assaults,” Umm Abed continued. “People come and document but all we have to protect us is God.”

Umm Abed, a shop owner in the Old City of Jerusalem .(Photo: Alaa Dayeh/Mondoweiss)

“All these marches are provocations,” Nada Khader, 53, told Mondoweiss on Thursday morning as police moved to ensure the alleyways were empty of the visible presence of its Palestinian inhabitants. Khader has been living in the Old City ever since Israeli authorities demolished her home in Beit Hanina twice — the first time in December last year, and the second in January. A widow and a mother of seven, Khader continues to face slow expulsion from Jerusalem.

“They are provoking us Jerusalemites in order to create problems and for them to try and prove their presence to say that Jerusalem is theirs,” she said.

Alaa Dayeh contributed to this article.

Brighton Rally and March Against Genocide in Palestine

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.

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

Abby Martin

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.