SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too)
“Either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; OR, the VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism.” Rosa Luxemburg
"Firas Masri, a political analyst and researcher, said that
Israel will benefit financially from the reconstruction of the city 'as
most of the material used to rebuild Gaza will come from Israeli
industries and they will be taxed by Israeli authorities as they enter
Gaza'”.
***
“In order to help rebuild Gaza, we have to reunite Gaza with the West Bank and become one economy, one government and policy. We cannot expect the international community to be motivated to help Gaza. So what we need is simply one government, one unity government which supervises, implements, mobilises plans for reconstruction in Gaza,” Naser Abdel Karim, the professor, said.
“We cannot continue reconstructing the economy and infrastructure with our and international money. And then Israel comes and demolishes the infrastructure and the economy every couple of years. This is a cycle that needs to end.”
Protesters supporting Palestinians walk down Michigan Ave., as President
Joe Biden visits a Ford electric vehicle center nearby, Tuesday, May
18, 2021, in Dearborn, Mich.(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
Excerpt:
These crimes are committed using American armaments, funded by
American tax dollars, and with the approval of the American government.
They are facilitated by arms deals and military alliances created behind
the backs of the American population and orchestrated to facilitate the
predatory interests of the US financial oligarchy.
On Monday,
after a week of murderous bombardment of the Gaza’s civilian population,
US President Joe Biden began a telephone discussion with Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by declaring, in the words of the official
readout, “The President reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right
to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attacks.”
When on
Tuesday Biden visited Dearborn, Michigan, the city with the nation’s
highest percentage of Arab American residents in the United States, he
was greeted by thousands of people protesting the crimes Israel is
committing with US support.
Asked if he would take a question on
the conflict from a reporter as he was test-driving a new Ford truck,
Biden replied, “No, you can’t. Not unless you get in front of the car as
I step on it.”
On Wednesday, Biden again spoke to Netanyahu about
“Israel’s progress in degrading the capabilities of Hamas and other
terrorist elements.” Biden said he expected “significant de-escalation
today,” a request that Netanyahu proceeded to ignore, declaring that he
is “determined to continue this operation until its aim is met.”
Biden’s
request for a “de-escalation,” presented by the media as a major shift
in US policy, is a cynical ploy. Since the Israeli bombardment began, it
has received the critical assistance of the US and the other major
imperialist powers.
On May 6, just days before the onslaught on
Gaza began, the Biden administration informed Congress that it approved
the sale of $735 million worth of JDAM and SDB smart bombs to Israel—the
very type of munitions now being rained down on the population of Gaza.
In the fiscal year 2019, the United States provided $3.8 billion in
foreign military aid to Israel, and Israel benefits from nearly $8
billion in US loan guarantees.
The
United States has used its veto power 42 times to protect Israel from
resolutions censuring its conduct in the United Nations Security
Council—more than half of the vetoes the US has ever exercised in that
body. This includes three vetoes of resolutions calling for a cease-fire
in the course of the latest massacre.
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the
one-sided slaughter being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
against Gaza. For 10 days, Israeli planes and artillery have rained
missiles, bombs and shells on a population of two million Palestinians
trapped by a merciless and unrelenting Israeli occupation and blockade
in the narrow and impoverished coastal enclave.
At least 219
Palestinians have been killed, nearly half of them women and children,
while thousands more have been wounded. Some 41,000 Gazans have been
forced to flee their homes to makeshift shelters in UN-run schools,
while Israel’s tactics, including the toppling of entire high-rise
buildings with “smart bombs”, has terrorized the entire population.
An
Israeli artillery unit fires toward targets in Gaza Strip, at the
Israeli Gaza border, Tuesday, May 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
Gaza’s
healthcare system is in a state of collapse, bed space and medical
supplies running out. Hospitals that were already overcrowded due to the
COVID-19 pandemic now overflow with wounded, many of them suffering
grievous injuries. A nurse told Al Jazeera that severed arms and legs were being piled up on a hospital bed.
Damage
to infrastructure and the cutoff of fuel to the territory is expected
to plunge all of Gaza into a blackout, cutting off power to homes as
well as hospitals and clinics, its sewer system and desalinization
plant. Those killed by Israeli bombs and shells will only be part of the
death toll, as the destruction and disabling of healthcare facilities
and basic infrastructure will raise the mortality rate for a long time
to come.
It is not only Israel that is guilty of war crimes, but
also its chief enabler, US imperialism. In the midst of the bombardment,
it was reported the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden
formally notified the US Congress on May 5 of a $735 million arms
package for Israel that includes Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs),
the very weapons used to turn Gaza’s tallest buildings into rubble. The
approval of this installment of the nearly $4 billion in aid that
Washington provides Israel annually makes clear the direct complicity of
the entire Democratic Party leadership in the crimes in Gaza.
Meanwhile,
Washington has exercised its veto power three times in the course of a
week to prevent the UN Security Council from issuing any statement
criticizing Israel’s actions.
The response of the Biden White
House to the unfolding massacre in Gaza provides incontrovertible proof
of its continuity with the Trump administration, but also with its
predecessors under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, which similarly
aided and abetted the Israel’s wars waged in 2008-2009 and 2014, which
together killed at least 3,500 Gazans, the overwhelming majority of them
civilians.
Millions of working people and youth all over the
world are justifiably outraged not only at Israel’s war crimes, but also
at their hypocritical justification by the likes of Biden and US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who incessantly mouth the phrase
“Israel has the right to defend itself.” In practice, this means that an
occupying power with one of the most advanced war machines in the world
has the “right” to inflict unrestricted death and violence upon the
occupied, a virtually defenseless population of refugees trapped in a
huge ghetto of Israel’s own making. On Monday, Biden joined this refrain
with a meaningless expression, announced by a spokesperson, of his
platonic support for a ceasefire with no date certain.
Overwhelming
popular anger over the war crimes in Gaza has found expression in
hundreds of protests that have taken place on every continent, save
Antarctica. The support for Israeli aggression by the United States and
the other imperialist powers notwithstanding, in the eyes of millions
around the world, Israel is viewed as pariah, a state that has lost all
moral and political legitimacy.
The
attempts to brand these protests as anti-Semitic is being seen for what
it is, a hamfisted attempt by Israel and its imperialist backers to
quash any opposition to their crimes and a libel against millions of
Jews all over the world who are shocked and revolted by the actions of
the Zionist state.
Anger and protests, however, are not enough.
What is required is a political perspective on what has produced these
crimes and how they can be stopped.
The eruption of violence
against Gaza is driven by the immense crisis and contradictions within
Israeli society itself. Tel Aviv’s decision to go to war was in the
first instance an attempt to contain a spiraling political crisis, with
the failure to form a viable government after four elections in two
years and a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who must remain in power
to avoid being jailed on corruption charges.
Underlying this
political crisis are intractable social contradictions. Israel remains,
together with the US, among the most unequal of the OECD countries.
According to the annual poverty report by the Israeli aid agency Latet,
Israel’s poverty rate jumped from 20.1 percent to 29.3 percent in 2020,
while, with the greatest concentration of billionaires in the world, its
richest 20 individuals have amassed a combined wealth of over $61
billion.
The unsustainability of such a social divide has been
laid bare by the revolt of Palestinian citizens of Israel, triggered
initially by the violent police storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque and
increasingly aggressive acts of “ethnic cleansing” in East Jerusalem.
Israeli Palestinians, who make up 20 percent of the country’s
population, joined Tuesday in general strike with Palestinians in the
occupied territories to protest the assault on Gaza and against Israel’s
apartheid-style “race laws” that condemn them to less than second-class
citizenship. Workers shut down shops, schools and construction sites
and stayed away from their jobs across the country.
While Israel’s
ruling camarilla, representing the interests of its billionaire ruling
class, seeks a base of support through the promotion of militarism and
anti-Arab hatred, unleashing fascist-Zionist gangs on the streets, there
is broad hostility to the government and its crimes within the working
class and sympathy for the Palestinians. This found expression Sunday in
a demonstration by Jewish and Israeli Palestinian healthcare workers
outside Haifa’s Rambam hospital calling for unity, which in embryonic
form expresses the drive by the working class to come together in a
struggle against their joint oppressor.
Seventy-three years after
the founding of the state of Israel and 55 years after the expansionist
Six-Day War, the Israeli ruling class and its vast military apparatus
have been unable to crush Palestinian resistance, which is inextricably
tied to the immense internal contradictions of Israeli society as a
whole. In response, the government behaves as if it has lost its head,
lashing out with violence that can only deepen its crisis.
Israel
finds itself at the end of is road. The entire Zionist project—a
reactionary perspective of carving out a sectarian Jewish capitalist
state in the Middle East through the dispossession of the Palestinian
people—has manifestly failed. While Zionist ideology justified this
state as a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, the Israeli
government institutes race laws and carries out violent crimes that
more and more resemble those of the Nazis.
The emergence of mass
opposition among Israeli Arabs and Jewish working class to the crimes of
the Israeli state further underscores the utter unviability of the
Zionist project. As the efforts over decades to drive a wedge between
Palestinian and Jews workers breaks down, raising the prospect of a
working-class revolt, Israel is incapable of surviving except through
the resort to totalitarian dictatorship.
Israel’s
crisis is bound up with the breakdown of the entire nation-state system
of the Middle East created through the formation of nominally
independent states based on the borders drawn by the former colonial
powers. The venal Arab bourgeoisie has dropped its charade of supporting
the Palestinians and its promotion of the chimera of a “two-state
solution” as it seeks to defend its own rule against rising social
opposition by drawing closer to Israel and imperialism. A decade after
the bloody suppression of the Egyptian Revolution all of the states
bordering Israel—Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt itself—are wracked by
internal conflict, while the broader Middle East has been devastated by
US wars.
Hamas, the dominant political force in Gaza, is likewise
incapable of offering any progressive alternative. Like the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO), it is wedded to the so-called two-state
solution, that would maintain Gaza and the West Bank as Palestinian
ghettos under the thumb of Zionist state. Under conditions where a
rebellion is developing inside Israel itself, Hamas is incapable of
making any appeal to the Israeli Arab population, let alone the Jewish
working class.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff, warned Monday that there could be “broader
destabilization” and “a whole series of negative consequences if the
fighting continues” in Gaza. The fear, clearly, is that the events in
Israel and the occupied territories can trigger revolutionary upheavals
throughout the region, while also posing the threat of a far wider war,
in the first instance against Iran.
These alternatives, war and
revolution, are posed not only in the Middle East, but on a world scale.
In the face of a global pandemic that has claimed three and a half
million lives, the imperialist powers are conducting a massive military
buildup in preparation for global war.
The same pandemic has
provoked social opposition in the working class and a worldwide
escalation of the class struggle that is paving the way to social
revolution.
Therein lies the road forward for the working masses
of the entire Middle East. The central question is that of overcoming
the crisis of perspective and leadership.
The dead end of
bourgeois nationalism, from Nasserism to the PLO, has thoroughly
vindicated Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. It established
that in the imperialist epoch, the realization of the basic tasks of
liberation from imperialist oppression in the oppressed countries cannot
be resolved under the leadership of the national bourgeoisie, which is
thoroughly tied to and dependent upon imperialism. They can be achieved
only through the independent political intervention of the working class
on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.
The
military assault on Gaza and the growing revolt within Israel itself
pose with utmost urgency the struggle to unite the working class, Arab,
Jewish and Iranian, across all national and sectarian divides, in a
common struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East as part of
the fight to put an end to capitalism all over the world.
The
vital task of mobilizing the working class on the basis of this program
depends upon the building of a new revolutionary leadership, organized
as sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International
in every country. [Emphasis added.]
The mask of “liberal democracy” has kept
falling while imperial Big Tech is dutifully canceling the voices of
Palestinians and defenders of Palestine en masse.
By Pepe Escobar
Future historians will mark the day when Western “liberal
democracy” issued a graphic proclamation: We bomb media offices and
destroy “freedom of the press” in an open air concentration camp while
we forbid peaceful demonstrations under a state of siege in the heart of
Europe; and if you revolt, we cancel you.
Gaza meets Paris.
The bombing of the al-Jalaa tower – an eminently residential building
which also housed the bureaus of al-Jazeera and AP, among others – by
“the only democracy in the Middle East” is directly connected to
the verboten order carried out by Macron’s Ministry of Interior.
For all practical purposes Paris endorsed the occupying power’s
provocations in East Jerusalem; the invasion of al-Aqsa mosque –
complete with tear gas and stun grenades; racist Zionist gangs harassing
and crying “death to Arabs”; armed settlers aggressing Palestinian
families threatened with expulsion from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah and
Silwan; a campaign of carpet bombing whose lethal victims – on average –
are 30% children.
Paris crowds were not intimidated. From Barbes to Republique, they
marched in the streets – their rallying cry being Israel assassin,
Macron complice. They instinctively understodood that Le Petit Roi – a
puny Rothschild employee – had just firebombed the historical legacy of
the nation that coined the Déclaration Universelle des Droits de
L’Homme.
The mask of “liberal democracy” kept falling again and again in a
loop – with imperial Big Tech dutifully canceling the voices of
Palestinians and defenders of Palestine en masse, in tandem with a
diplomatic kabuki that could fool only the already brain-dead.
On May 16, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi chaired a United States
Security Council (UNSC) debate via video link that had been stalled by
Washington, non-stop, throughout the week. China presides the UNSC
throughout May.
The UNSC could not even agree on a mere joint statement. Once again
because the UNSC was blocked by the – cowardly – Empire of Chaos.
It was up to Hua Liming, former Chinese ambassador to Iran, to break it all down in a single sentence:
“The US doesn’t want to give the credit of mediating the
Palestine-Israel conflict to China, especially when China is the
president of the UNSC.”
The usual imperial procedure is to “talk”, “offer you can’t refuse”
Mafia-style, to both sides under the table – as the combo behind Crash
Test Dummy, an avowed Zionist, had already admitted on an appalling
White House tweet “reaffirming” its “strong support for Israel’s right
to defend itself”.
Liming emphasized, correctly, “this is the key reason why any
solution or ceasefire between Israel and Gaza or other forces in the
region would be temporary.”
The whole Global South is incessantly bombarded by the imperial
“human rights” rhetoric – from convicted crook Navalny to fake reports
on Xinjiang. Yet when there is a real human rights catastrophe unleashed
by the settler colonialist ally’s carpet bombing, Liming pointed out
how “the hypocrisy and double standards of the US have been exposed
again”.
Amos Yadlin is the former IDF Military Intelligence Directorate chief, and also former Israeli military attaché to the US.
In a meeting with South African Zionists, he admitted the obvious:
the Zionist carnage against Gaza can be stopped by Crash Test Dummy –
who happens to be, what else, a Zionist puppet.
Yadlin claimed that the Crash Test Dummy administration, rather the
combo behind it, was getting “impatient” and he would be “not surprised
if this will all stop in 48 hours.” And once again he had to reinforce
the obvious: “When the Egyptians ask Israel to stop, Israel doesn’t want
to stop. But if the Americans will ask Israel to stop, Israel will have
to listen.”
The Empire practices trademark doublespeak when referring to the
“international community” – which in theory gathers at the UN. The
concomitant 24/7 propaganda barrage applies only to the motley crew of
partners in crime, minions, lackeys, poodles and vassals, imperially
ignoring and/or pissing on the heads of over 80% of the planet.
Confronted with the reality of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
Ukraine and others, “rules-based international order” does not even
qualify as a joke for retards.
So next time you see some sub-zoology specimen deploying the “Israel
has the right to defend itself” Maximum Stupidity argument, the only
possible response is to unleash facts as missiles.
Every sentient being with a conscience knows Palestine faces a racist
settler colonialism project boasting an armed-to-the-hilt-military and
several nuclear bombs, specialized in practicing state terrorism.
Gaza though is a particularly horrifying case. Population: nearly 2
million people. One of the top densely populated areas on the planet. A
de facto open air concentration camp where no less than 50% are
children, one in ten stunted to a great extent because of food shortages
provoked by the Israeli blockade. The official Israeli military plan is
to allow just enough food in so the whole population barely survives.
50% of the population depends on food aid.
No less than 70% of families are refugees, who were ethnically
cleansed from what is now southern Israel: there are roughly 1.46
million refugees out of a population of 1.9 million.
Gaza has 8 refugee camps – some being bombed as we speak. Never
forget that Israel ruled Gaza directly from 1967 to 2005 and did less
than zero to better their appalling conditions.
There are only 22 health centers, 16 social services offices and 11
food distribution centers, serving roughly 1 million people. No airport
or port: both destroyed by Israel. The unemployment rate is 50% – the
highest on the whole planet. Clean water is available to only 5% of the
population.
But then there’s the Resistance. Elijah Magnier has shown how they
have already pierced Israel’s pre-fabricated aura of invulnerability and
“prestige” – and there’s only one way to go, as the speed, accuracy,
range and potency of rockets and missiles can only improve.
In parallel, in a wise strategic move, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have
made it very clear they prefer that Hezbollah does not get itself
directly involved – for now, thus allowing the whole Global South to be
focused on the carnage perpetrated against Gaza.
“A landscape of iron and desolation”
Sociologie de Jerusalem, by Sylvaine Bulle, is a short but quite
illuminating book showing how the battle for East Jerusalem is as
imperative for the future of Palestine as the tragedy in Gaza.
Bulle focuses on the “internal racism” in Israel directly linked to
the hegemony of extreme-right Zionist “elites”. A key consequence has
been the “peripherization” and marginalization of East Jerusalem, thrown
into a situation of “forced dependence” of Westernized West Jerusalem.
Bulle shows how East Jerusalem only exists as “a landscape of iron
and desolation”, through a juxtaposition of ultra-dense and totally
abandoned zones. Palestinians who live in these areas are not regarded
or respected as citizens.
It got much worse after 2004 and the construction of The Wall – which
prevented the daily mobility of Palestinians living in the occupied
territories and the Palestinians in Jerusalem. That was an extra
fracture, with parts of East Jerusalem isolated on the other side of the
wall and a lot of people now living in a real no man’s land. Very few
across the “liberal democratic” West have any idea how does that feel in
practice.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem don’t have Israeli nationality. Most
have Jordanian passports. Yet now even Palestinians with Israeli
nationality are rebelling – in most cases in very poor towns in the
center of the country. Young generations simply have no reason to
believe they belong in Israel.
As for Israeli secular leftists, they have been “neutralized” and
carry no political power, as they were incapable of integrating the
working masses, which in turn were completely captured by hardcore
religious extremists.
Bulle’s conclusion, expressed with way too much diplomacy (this is
France, after all), is inevitable: the state of Israel is more and more
Jewish and less and less democratic, a de facto Zionist regime. She
believes it might be possible to rebuild the link between Jewish
national identity and democracy, including the rights of Palestinian
minorities.
Sorry, but that’s not gonna happen, as the current tragedy, which started in East Jerusalem, graphically shows.
The Via Dolorosa continues – as we all watch in horror. Just imagine
the inter-galactic Western levels of hysteria if Russia or China were
bombing, firing shells and missiles and killing children in residential
areas. No wonder the Empire of Chaos – and Lies, posing as a “liberal
democracy” while enabling the murderous Zionist project, is firmly
flirting with the dustbin of History.
Meanwhile, those who expose the crimes of Israel are branded as “anti-Semites” in an exercise that twists that term beyond recognition into a calumny against anyone who expresses the disgust and anger felt by people all over the world, including millions of Jews, over the ongoing war crimes in Gaza. Indeed, this definition is itself anti-Semitic, identifying Jews everywhere with the criminal policies of a state that rules in the interest of a narrow Israeli financial and corporate oligarchy.
The vast gulf separating the indifference of US imperialism toward these crimes and its “horror” and invocation of “human rights” in relation to Xinjiang proves once again that all morality is class morality. The moral indignation of imperialist operatives like Blinken is activated only when it is needed to justify wars of aggression and plunder and advance the interests of the US financial oligarchy.
That the filthy banner of “human rights” previously raised to justify wars in the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa is now being unfurled as part of the preparations for “great power” conflict with China and Russia is a measure of the extreme tensions and dangers in the global situation.
Pro-Palestinian supporters in New York marched near the Israeli consulate. [Eduardo Munoz/ Reuters]MORE SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE PICS:https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/5/12/in-pictures-9
Israel launched air strikes against Gaza, the besieged Palestinian enclave, killing 24 people including children.
Militants
had earlier fired a few rockets at southern Israel and the Jerusalem
area, in a day characterized by massive violence against the
Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
Israel’s military
announced it had beefed up its forces on its border with Gaza and was
suspending a major drill to prepare for a possible escalation.
Palestinians
evacuate a wounded man during clashes with Israeli security forces at
the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City Monday, May 10,
2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
Earlier in the
morning, 1,000 security forces stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in
East Jerusalem as worshippers were praying, firing stun grenades, tear
gas and rubber bullets, while snipers took up positions on rooftops,
injuring more than 330 Palestinians. More than 700 Palestinians have
been injured in just a few days by Israeli security forces in Jerusalem
and across the West Bank.
Police locked hundreds of worshippers
inside the mosque, prevented doctors and medical teams from entering the
compound and attacked and beat up those who sought to help the injured.
They forced their way into the compound’s health clinic, where they
sprayed pepper gas and lobbed stun grenades at those receiving treatment
there.
The storming of the mosque, the third holiest site in
Islam, provoked angry demonstrations around the country, including in
the northern Arab city of Umm al-Fahm and the nearby Wadi Ara, as well
as in Jaffa which has witnessed protests over the past week against
plans to take over Palestinian-owned houses for a Jewish yeshiva.
The
crackdown on Jerusalem Day—the anniversary of Israel’s illegal
annexation of East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in the 1967 War—ahead
of the planned Flags March by Israel’s settler groups and far right
forces through Arab neighbourhoods, was another provocation designed to
precipitate a war with the Palestinians.
It was by far the most
violent crackdown in the weeks of mounting tensions and bloody
repression by Israel’s security forces since the start of Ramadan on
April 12, amid protests against land grabs by Israeli settlers,
settlement expansion, and the planned eviction of scores of Palestinians
in Sheikh Jarrah, north of Jerusalem’s Old City. A factor in the
explosive state of social relations has been the impact of the pandemic
that has left thousands of young people without work.
The planned
eviction is part of the government’s broader process of judaicising the
city, making it impossible for the Palestinians to ever set up their own
mini-state with some part of East Jerusalem as its capital. Far right
legislators, including Religious Zionism chairman Bezalel Smotrich and
Itamar Ben-Gvir of Jewish Power have led their supporters through Sheikh
Jarrah, taunting the Palestinians, chanting “death to Arabs”. Smotrich
called on the right-wing parties in talks with opposition leader Yair
Lapid, who heads Yesh Atid and is trying to cobble together a coalition
to replace Netanyahu, to halt all talks with Mansour Abbas and his
United Arab List, denouncing him as a “terror” supporter.
On
Thursday night, more than 100 Palestinians were wounded, with 21 needing
hospitalization, after hundreds of far right Jewish Israelis marched
through Jerusalem’s streets and confronted Palestinians. On Friday
night, more than 200 Palestinians were injured, of whom 88 had to be
taken to hospital, after several hundred riot police stormed the al-Aqsa
mosque compound, provoking bloody confrontations with worshippers.
There were violent clashes at Sheikh Jarrah as several hundred
worshippers went to show their solidarity with residents.
On
Saturday night, 80 people were injured, including a one-year-old, when
clashes erupted outside the Old City, while on Sunday, 14 people had to
be treated for injuries after riot police attacked Palestinians
protesting the Sheikh Jarrah evictions.
There have also been
demonstrations against Israel’s brutal crackdown in East Jerusalem and
in support of the Sheikh Jarrah families in a number of Arab towns and
villages in Israel, as well as in the port city of Haifa and the
northern city of Nazareth, and in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank
that were met with heavy handed repression.
These
demonstrations in the last few days of mainly young Palestinians mark
an unprecedented involvement of Israel’s Palestinian citizens in
anti-government protests. It is a spontaneous movement, increasingly
alienated from its traditional leaders—the Fatah-dominated Palestinian
Authority, Hamas in Gaza and the Arab leaders in Israel.
On
Sunday, flatly rejecting international condemnation of the planned
evictions of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Netanyahu
declared Israel “firmly rejects” pressure not to build in Jerusalem.
Turning truth on its head, he proclaimed that Israel would not allow any
extremist element—meaning the Palestinians—to undermine peace in
Jerusalem, “We will impose law and order aggressively and responsibly.
We will continue to safeguard freedom of worship for all religions but
will not allow violent riots.” “I say to the terror groups: Israel will
respond with force to any act of aggression from the Gaza Strip,” he
added.
He refused multiple entreaties from international figures
as well as his own security officials to postpone the Jerusalem Day
Flags March, limit the number of participants and change the route, so
as not to enter the al-Aqsa compound. He and Public Security Minister
Amir Ohana insisted on letting the march go ahead without any changes to
the route, with the police offering thousands of officers to escort the
march. Netanyahu defended the security forces, praising their “just
struggle” and commending the “steadfastness that the Israeli police and
our security forces are currently displaying.”
On Monday
afternoon, barely an hour before the march was due to start, the
organisers announced they were calling it off telling the police they
were ceding responsibility to them even as thousands of religious and
ultra-nationalist youth were assembling. This came shortly after the
authorities, reportedly in response to an order from Netanyahu, decided
to reroute the march away from the Old City, including Damascus Gate and
the Muslim Quarter, in Palestinian East Jerusalem.
It was at this
time that Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that controls
Gaza, which has been subject since 2007 to an illegal blockade by Israel
and latterly by Egypt, issued “an ultimatum until 6pm” to Israel to
withdraw its security forces from the al-Aqsa mosque compound and Sheikh
Jarrah. As the ultimatum expired, the Israeli military activated
sirens, the Knesset was evacuated, and the Flags March dispersed after
reports of rocket fire in the Jerusalem area.
Netanyahu called for
a national security cabinet meeting in preparation for increasing
turmoil ahead of Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of Ramadan on Wednesday
evening, May 12.
Football players of the Chilean Club Deportivo Palestino express their solidarity with the people of Jerusalem and all of Palestine by wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh.
