“Whereas the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid in South Africa, for example, brazenly proclaimed their sin, the [Israeli] practitioners of apartheid in Palestine beguilingly protest their innocence.”

Amnesty International? Human Rights Watch (HRW)? Perhaps even the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem?

Since January of last year – culminating with Amnesty International this week – all three human rights groups have made international headlines by coming out with major reports identifying Israel as an apartheid state.

If you guessed either of those three, though, you were wrong. The actual author of the quote was Fayez Sayegh, the late Palestinian intellectual, activist and diplomat.

And he wrote it in 1965.

Palestinians have been correctly identifying Israel as an apartheid state for decades.

I must admit that I cheated a little and tweaked the quote ever so slightly. The original text (Sayegh’s brilliant pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, which you can read in full here), actually used the present tense “proclaim” rather than “proclaimed” as above. In 1965, the South African apartheid regime was, of course, very much alive.

I also put the word “Israeli” in square brackets where Sayegh actually used the word “Zionist” – far more accurate and correct in this context. I say that because it’s not only Israeli citizens who practise apartheid in Palestine, but their Zionist supporters in the West (political, military and financial) who make apartheid possible on the ground.

Of course, a liberal human rights NGO like Amnesty International would never use the word “Zionist” for fear of being smeared as anti-Semitic. Herein lies one of the problems and limitations with Amnesty International. They are weak on this issue.

Their coyness to identify and name the racist ideology at the root of Israeli apartheid – namely Zionism – has done them no favours. Instantly and brazenly, the Israeli government smeared them as “anti-Semitic” for their accurate report on Israeli apartheid this week.

Amnesty International’s report is to be welcomed. Late is better than never, and we can hope that the group will make good on its promise this week to carry out an actual international campaign against Israeli apartheid.

However, I could not help but think of the Sayegh quote this week while all the media attention was on Amnesty International. Why in the West is the word of the natives not believed over the word of the white man?Why does it take the words of two largely white liberal human rights NGOs for mainstream acceptance of the plainly obvious fact that Israel is an apartheid state? Amnesty and HRW themselves required the (almost) permission of the Israeli NGO B’Tselem before they went ahead with their Israeli apartheid reports. Why is that?

Why are the well-documented and reported experiences of Palestinians themselves not enough? Why are the words of Palestinian rights groups like Al-Haq, Addameer, the Palestinian Centre for Human rights, and many others, not enough?

Is it the deeply embedded nature of racism within our societies or our media? Or even within the human rights groups themselves?

I don’t have all the answers to all these questions. But one thing is for sure – Israel has now lost the propaganda war and the PR battle on the question of the apartheid label.

By Israel lashing out at Amnesty International this week, with the absurd slur that the group is “anti-Semitic” due to its opposition to Israeli apartheid, the nefarious nature of its smear campaigns against the Palestinians and their supporters is clearer to many more people.

It’s taking far too long, but we are winning the war against Israeli apartheid.

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It’s the kind of brutality habitually imposed upon Palestinians by the illegitimate Zionist regime to maintain a “pure” Jewish state in historical Palestine.

But because Assad held a US passport, his case generated ever so slightly more attention over there than usual. The US State Department and several US lawmakers called for Israel to “investigate” itself over the apparent killing.

This is worse than pointless.

Last week, Representative Rashida Tlaib rose to explain why she was voting against the proposal to give an extra $1 billion in arms funding for Israel’s so-called Iron Dome missile system. The weapon is a key component of Israel’s siege of Gaza, which helps maintain the apartheid regime’s crushing grip on the coastal strip. Gaza is, in effect, the world’s largest open air prison.

Tlaib is a Palestinian American woman. She said correctly in her very short speech in Congress that Palestinians are living under a “violent apartheid system” and that the Israeli government is an apartheid regime. “Not my words, the words of Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own human rights watch organisation B’Tselem,” she pointed out.

The response to this was nothing less than racist. Ferociously so.

Using a barely concealed dog-whistle, Republican Chuck Fleischmann spat out that Tlaib was a “radical minority” and claimed she was guilty of “anti-Semitism” because she had refused to “stand with me, with Israel” and its allegedly “defensive weapons system.”

Fleischmann claimed that Tlaib is “anti-Israel” and “anti-Semitic” because she described accurately the apartheid regime under which Palestinians live. “As Americans,” he ranted, “we can never stand for that.”

The obvious and intended implication of Fleischmann’s words is that the “minority” Palestinian Arab Muslim Tlaib was not a “real” American like him, a white man. Worse still, even some of Tlaib’s Democrat colleagues joined in the denunciations. The “bipartisan” anti-Palestinian consensus still holds strong in Congress, it seems.

Tlaib’s action in voting against an extra $1 billion of US taxpayers’ money being sent to the violent Israeli apartheid regime – important as her vote is – was little more than symbolic. The proposal was passed overwhelmingly, with 420 lawmakers in favour and only nine voting against. There were two abstentions, one of whom was the untrustworthy “progressive” Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The bipartisan vitriol hurled against Rashida Tlaib demonstrated in the vilest possible way that the pro-Israel lobby cannot tolerate even the slightest degree of dissent. It will accept nothing less than total capitulation. And once you’ve capitulated, it will carry on kicking you, just to make sure you stay down. The responses to the use of “apartheid” to describe the regime imposed by Israel on the people of occupied Palestine show that appeasing the pro-Israel lobby really is a waste of time. Far better to stand up and be counted in your opposition to injustice and racism.

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——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib speaks out against $1B funding to Israel”

According to eyewitnesses, Omar had been watching — peacefully, it must be said — a protest against the Israeli-led siege of Gaza. An Israeli army sniper calmly and deliberately – acting under the orders of his commanding officer – looked through his gun sight and fired a live round through the boy’s neck. Omar lost consciousness straight away.

His death means that Israeli army killers have now ended the lives of 73 Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this year alone.

“Israeli forces routinely shoot and kill Palestinian children with impunity in circumstances that suggest unlawful and wilful killings,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish of the human rights group Defence for Children International Palestine. Abu Eqtaish called for accountability “by ending weapons sales and support for Israeli forces.”

The siege of Gaza is a lengthy and ongoing Israeli injustice. Even before it was fully imposed in 2007, Israel had for years decreed military closures of the territory, shutting down its crossing points at will. The siege has resulted in the entirely predictable collapse of the Palestinian economy in Gaza.

It is no wonder that ordinary Palestinians all over the territory have risen up against this strangulating injustice, and are once again marching in peaceful protests against the siege. This, remember, is despite the very real possibility that they could be shot and killed, or suffer life-changing injuries simply for standing up for their legitimate and very basic human and political rights.

More than two million people live in the crowded coastal enclave today, half of them children. Around 80 per cent of the population are refugees and their descendants from inside what is now known as Israel; their home towns and villages are within historic Palestine, which has been occupied since 1948.

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias deliberately and systematically drove out around 800,000 Palestinians. Although they have a legitimate right to return, they have never been allowed to do to, solely because they are not Jews.

Today, the only crossing point that Israel does not have full control over is in the southern Gaza town of Rafah leading to and from Egypt. However, the US-backed military dictatorship which has ruled Egypt since the coup in 2013 is also a willing accomplice in the siege. Another example of Egyptian complicity was witnessed last week.

Palestinians once again protested at the boundary fence on Wednesday 25 August. Israeli soldiers once again fired live ammunition at the demonstrators; their officers had reportedly ordered their troops to behave “more aggressively” towards the Palestinians.

Five of the injured were shot with live ammunition. Journalist Taha Raafat Baker, 32, was hit in the leg by a tear gas canister; another child was among the wounded, said Palestinian human right group Mezan.

Egypt responded to the Israeli attacks on Palestinian protestors by helping the Israeli killers and punishing their Palestinian victims. The regime in Cairo imposed an indefinite closure on the Rafah crossing. The Salah Al-Din goods crossing – where only limited items are permitted to enter Gaza at the best of times – is also closed.

Hundreds of Palestinians are now completely stranded in Egypt. Many are running out of money and have no means to access family support networks; international money transfers to and from Gaza are usually impossible to make.

Yet Egypt is only one component of the international conspiracy against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. As Tamara Nassar, my colleague at The Electronic Intifada has noted, the UN and Qatar are also colluding in the siege. Both have agreed to implement a programme which gives Israel a veto over the list of those Palestinians who will and will not be given food aid.

This is collective punishment, yet another of Israel’s many war crimes. How many more will it be allowed to commit with impunity before the siege of Gaza is brought to an end? This must happen unconditionally and without delay.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Eye: “Palestinian boy shot during Gaza rallies by Israeli army dies from wounds”

The video shows Bennett helping to lead a training session teaching Israelis how to insert themselves into Wikipedia (the free online encyclopaedia that unknown persons can edit), and push the Israeli government line.

“The goal of the day is to teach people how to edit in Wikipedia, which is the number one source of information today, in the world,” he explained.

“As a way of example: if someone searches the Gaza flotilla, we want to be there. We want to be the guys who influence what is written there, how it’s written, and to ensure that it’s balanced and Zionist in nature.”

Watch | Israeli occupation Prime Minister Naftali Bennett "we want to influence what is written in Wikipedia to ensure it's balanced with the Zionist nature."#FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/03mLENGDWB

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) August 24, 2021

The concept of something being both “balanced and Zionist in nature” is an interesting one. Or rather, it is a total contradiction in terms – much like the idea of a “Jewish and democratic” state.

If the Zionist perspective was so obviously the correct and “balanced” one, then why does it need a small army of state-backed foreign operatives deceptively inserting itself into online debates?

The flotillas to Gaza, of course, were a series of non-violent popular resistance activities that activists from around the world held around that time.

They were attempts to break the brutal siege on the Gaza Strip, which Israel has enforced since 2007. Activists met with some degree of success – before the Mavi Marmara massacre in 2010.

That year, not long before Bennett spoke in the video above, the largest flotilla to date was hijacked by Israeli troops in international waters. This resulted in the deaths of ten Turkish activists; nine were immediately murdered, some “execution-style” according to witnesses, with the tenth dying of his wounds some years later.

Israel was unapologetic, insisting on its supposed right to “defend” itself from the unarmed solidarity activists and their symbolic cargos of siege-busting aid.

But as a result, Israel suffered in the court of world opinion. A wave of boycotts followed, with several high-profile music acts declaring that they would never play in the country. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) got a huge boost.

No wonder Bennett and his minions decided that something must be done about the worldwide battle for the narrative that Israel was losing to the Palestinians – by subverting Wikipedia.

In the decade since, Israel’s standing in the court of world opinion has only declined.

Israel has degraded itself, time and time again, by repeated massacres of Palestinians all over Palestine – especially in the Gaza Strip – and by the slow grind of occupation and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, to be replaced by Israeli settlers.

Israel has almost given up trying to convince anyone else it is in the right. On a certain level, the country’s leaders know that battle was lost a long time ago. Instead, they resort to lobbying efforts aimed at banning, outlawing, or at least chilling and suppressing, criticisms of Israel and its official racist ideology: Zionism.

Last year, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of having “promoted laws in most US states” that ban or otherwise inhibit the BDS Movement’s activities.

Of course, Netanyahu did not mention that these laws are all blatantly unconstitutional and are likely to be swept away. Every time these laws are challenged in higher courts, they are struck down as violations of the First Amendment to the US Constitution: the right to free speech.

It is with Bennett’s decade-old video in mind that I read this week about his visit to the US as Israeli prime minister.

Bennett is a hard-right, violent, anti-Palestinian racist. In other words, he is like every other Israeli leader before him. But Israel seems to have perfected the knack of every single succeeding prime minister being more racist and right-wing than the last.

Soon after embarking on his political career, Bennett infamously declared: “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.”

For once, he was partly speaking the truth. As a young officer in the occupying army, Bennett personally participated in Israel’s April 1996 massacre of more than 100 civilians sheltering at a United Nations peacekeeper base in Qana, Lebanon.

Despite all of this – or perhaps rather because of it – Bennett can be assured of a warm welcome in Washington DC during his meeting with US President Joe Biden.

The US empire, after all, has never shied away from killing indigenous peoples.

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Those are the words of Mohammed El-Kurd, the renowned Palestinian activist from East Jerusalem. He and his family are threatened with expulsion from their homes. They have committed no crime, but are being kicked out solely and exclusively because they are not Jewish, and Israel is a Jewish supremacist state.

Mohammed and his sister Muna El-Kurd had an upswing of media attention back in May-June, when the Israeli war against Gaza was being resisted by the Palestinian “Unity Uprising”.Now, that has died down. But the Palestinian plight remains the same.

“The situation in Sheikh Jarrah is not hard to understand,” Mohammed wrote in his Guardian opinion piece debut this week. “It is a perfect illustration of settler colonialism, a microcosm of the reality for Palestinians across 73 years of Zionist rule.”

Zionism, Israel’s officially sanctioned – and only legally protected – ideology is a racist one.

El-Kurd’s apparent weariness over having to dream up imaginative new ways of saying and writing the same thing day in and day out, week in and week out, is sadly familiar to those of us who report on the injustices against the Palestinians as our jobs.

Ethnic cleansing is wrong. Ethno-religious supremacy is wrong. Killing children is wrong.

Israel has killed 11 Palestinian children in the West Bank since the start of the year. And that’s in addition to the 60 children in Gaza it has killed in the same timeframe.

Israeli army thugs last Friday shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian child in cold blood.

Muhammad Munir Tamimi had been among a group who had confronted a heavily armed gang of Israeli soldiers invading their village with nothing more than stones. The Israelis even blocked the seriously wounded teen’s evacuation to a hospital in Ramallah as he lay bleeding from his guts – something Israeli soldiers make a habit of.

Tamimi died from his wounds later that night.

On Wednesday another Palestinian child was struck down by Israeli army gunfire.

Mohammad Mo’ayyad Bahjat Abu Sara, 11 years old, was gunned down in the hail of Israeli bullets which struck the car he, his father and his family had been using to shop for groceries. Six Israeli soldiers had pelted the car with no less than 13 bullets, according to eyewitnesses.

Palestinian media outlets posted harrowing photos of the car with its abandoned groceries, including bags of bread apparently covered in the dead child’s blood.

As you can see from the embedded Tweets above human rights group Defence for Children International – Palestine plays a key role in documenting these Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

As a result of DCIP’s outstanding and essential human rights work in protection of Palestinian children, Israel has now committed its yet another act of repression against the group.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, Israeli army thugs raided DCIP’s West Bank office, stealing computers, clients files and hard drives. The human rights group said that no documents were left in the office to give any indication of the reason for the raid, and they did not leave behind any receipt of materials seized.

Khaled Quzmar, the general director of DCIP, said: “This latest act by Israeli authorities pushes forward an ongoing campaign to silence and eliminate Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations like DCIP.”

The group called for Israeli authorities to immediately end their persecutions of Palestinian human rights groups, demanding that “the international community must hold Israeli authorities accountable.”

That is exactly what is missing.

As Mohammed El-Kurd alluded to, the plight of the Palestinians is probably one of the most well understood, well explained and well documented injustices in history.

As he concluded in his Guardian piece: “The problem is not ignorance, it is inaction.” There is no political will in the West to hold Israel to account for its crimes.

We must act to ensure that changes, and soon.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The Real News Network: “Palestinian villagers fight against illegal Israeli settlements in Beita”

After years of BDS campaign appeals to them, the US ice cream maker declared that it would no longer be selling its products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank – on stolen Palestinian land, in other words.

The BDS movement has welcomed the move as a step in the right direction, calling on Ben and Jerry’s to go further and withdraw from Israel altogether.

Palestine’s BDS National Committee (or BNC) said it was: “A decisive step towards ending the company’s complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of Palestinian rights.”

The BNC hailed the company for: “Finally bringing its policy on Israel’s regime of oppression against Palestinians in line with its progressive positions on Black Lives Matter and other justice struggles.”

Starting as a small business in Vermont, Ben and Jerry’s has a reputation as a socially responsible company. It has an official policy of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, declaring in 2016 that: “Systemic and institutionalised racism are the defining civil rights and social justice issues of our time.”

Although it broadly welcomed Ben and Jerry’s move on Monday, the BNC concluded its statement calling for the company to do more and to: “End all operations in apartheid Israel.”

The Israeli licensee for Ben and Jerry’s told reporters that he had declined the US company’s request to end its supply to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “I refuse it,” he said, stating that such an action would likely fall foul of Israel’s anti-BDS laws. As such, the licencing agreement it has with its Israeli distributor – which ends at the end of next year – will not be renewed.

Some activists on social media were unimpressed, demanding that Ben and Jerry’s withdraw from Israel altogether.

In my view, it was at least a step in the right direction, and the company is soon going to come up against the sharp wall of Israel’s support for its West Bank settlements. The West Bank settlements are Israel – and the reality is that all of Israel is a settlement. The West Bank settlements are fully integrated into Israel’s economy, laws and state infrastructure.

Palestinians in the West Bank, of course, are fully discriminated against by Israel’s apartheid system. Indigenous Palestinians living in the same areas as the newly-arrived Israeli settlers illegally squatting on their stolen land have none of the same rights as the Israelis.

That is a prime example of exactly why Israel is an apartheid system.

The reactions from Israeli government officials, politicians and anti-Palestinian propagandists in the West have been nothing short of unhinged.

Israel lobbyist Ian Austin (a former MP who left the Labour Party over Jeremy Corbyn’s support of Palestinian rights and who relentlessly smeared the former leader as “anti-Semitic”) tweeted openly anti-Palestinian racism, mocking up a fake Ben and Jerry’s ice cream tub that included the name of Hamas.

Former prime minister and opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared – with no sense of irony or self-awareness – a boycott of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

The current prime minister, Naftali Bennett, dubbed Ben and Jerry’s an “anti-Israel ice cream” and declared that the government would fight the boycott “with all our might“.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid (a former TV news host) smeared the ice cream maker as anti-Semitic and demanded that states in the US with anti-BDS laws apply them in this case.

In reality, every single time that US states’ anti-BDS laws have been brought before superior courts, they have been repealed as blatantly unconstitutional. Five states have already done so.

Israel’s president – supposedly a “moderate” – threw an even wilder tantrum, claiming the frozen dessert maker’s actions were “a new kind of terrorism“.

There is going to be a reckoning: it is almost certainly going to be impossible for Ben and Jerry’s to supply companies in “Israel proper” only, and not to West Bank settlements. In practice, the Israeli economy makes no distinction between the two. Ben and Jerry’s is ultimately going to have to make one of two decisions: to reverse the announcement it made on Monday, or to withdraw from Israel altogether. We must ensure it makes the latter.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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——-

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

WION: “The West Asia Post | Meltdown over ice cream in Israel”

The law bars the spouses of Palestinian citizens of Israel from receiving citizenship.

This means that Palestinians from Haifa, Acre or Jaffa are effectively banned from marrying Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and Arabs from a series of other “enemy” states.

I say “effectively” since technically they could marry, but would then be forced to live apart since Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are banned from living inside “Israel proper” by a whole series of other racist laws.

The law does not apply to marriages of Jewish Israeli citizens to Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It is indisputably a racist law, discriminating against Arabs.

It was introduced as a supposed “emergency” law in 2003, but until now, it has been renewed annually without fail. However, what that does mean is that the Knesset must vote each year to ensure the law stays in full effect.

But what happened this week was not some sudden radical change of heart by Israeli lawmakers. It was rather a matter of opportunism by the new opposition, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the last prime minister. The vote to extend the law failed by the narrowest possible margin, 59 to 59.

Read: Israel Knesset member calls for killing of people in mixed marriages

Netanyahu and his political allies in the opposition support the law in principle, and have voted to extend it many times in the past. They simply sought to embarrass the fragile new coalition government led by Naftali Bennett (another hard-right racist and a former Netanyahu coalition partner).

Only a tiny minority of six Knesset lawmakers voted against the law as a matter of principle. These were Palestinians from the Joint List group.

In a crude reminder of how all Zionism is racism – and not only the right-wing Zionism promoted by demagogues like Netanyahu and Bennett – even the supposedly “left-wing” Meretz party voted to extend the racist marriage law.

Meretz is part of the new coalition government led by hard-right racist Bennett, so there was an element of political opportunism to Meretz’s vote in favour of the racist law. But mostly, it was ideological: Meretz is a Zionist party, so it voted for a Zionist law.

One of their lawmakers, Yair Golan, ranted against the opposition in the Knesset.

He accused Netanyahu and his ultra-right allies in the opposition (such as Kahanist party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir) of being in the “anti-Zionist, anti-nationalist camp” and of “betraying the Zionist vision.”

A retired high-ranking military officer, Golan spoke in openly racist terms of the opposition supposedly wanting to “drown Israeli citizens in a sea of Palestinians.” Some leftist. It was a phrase that could have just as easily come out of the mouths of Katie Hopkins or Tommy Robinson.

And it wasn’t only Meretz.

Arise Israel, an activist group that had been one of the leaders of the long-running anti-Netanyahu protests, also lashed out against the opposition in racist terms. This is the consequence of Zionism: the institutionalisation of racism across an entire society on every level.

Seeing a video of opposition politician Bezalel Smotrich, another Kahanist, declaring his refusal to vote with the government on the racist marriage law, the group responded on Twitter accusing him of: “Voting against the state of Israel and against the security of the state of Israel… shame on you.”

When I broke the story of Assaf Kaplan, the Israeli spy hired by the Labour Party to help run its social media “listening” campaign, Zionists were hard put to come up with a defence. That didn’t stop them trying though, with one weakly describing Kaplan as an “anti-Netanyahu protester”.

Irrelevant. As their behaviour in Israel this week shows, the Zionist “left” is equally as racist as the Zionist right. Israel’s new President Isaac Herzog is another example of that.

The failed Israeli Labor Party leader now holds the mainly ceremonial role. He’s being praised as a sensible centrist in the West.

But this is the same guy who said that Jews marrying non-Jews is an “actual plague”, was formerly a spy in Israel’s violent cybercrime and blackmail operation Unit 8200, and who ran an openly racist election ad in which his comrades gushed that he “understands the Arab mentality” because he has seen “the Arabs” through “the sight of a rifle”.

Progressive Israel!

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—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “Israeli lawmakers fail to extend family reunification law”

Today, though, things have died down. In a way this was inevitable. Movements come and movements go. They ebb and flow. Awareness grows slowly over months, years, decades and even (in the case of long term struggles for freedom like the one in Palestine) centuries.

The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, began in 2014, with the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young African-American whose life was snuffed out by a white police officer in Ferguson. This movement also developed in waves, with activists drawing attention to more and more cases of injustice against Black people, usually young Black men who were victims of police racism and brutality.

The latest major wave of the BLM movement crested last year, with the infamous murder of George Floyd. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced this month to 22.5 years in prison for the murder. Chauvin used excessive force to arrest and detain Floyd for an alleged petty crime. A police officer at the time, Chauvin infamously knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. The whole murder was caught on camera by witnesses at the scene.

It is a sad fact of history is that it is often not until such shockingly violent injustices are exposed to the public and in plain sight for all to see, that there is a reaction powerful enough to make actual change.

This is also the case in Palestine. It is unusual to see the corporate media paying attention until Palestinians begin firing back, or otherwise responding to Israeli violence.

The expulsions by Israel of Palestinians from East Jerusalem neighbourhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah that have been highlighted by activists over the past few months are really nothing new. Indeed, as many activists have pointed out, all of Palestine is Sheikh Jarrah in one way or another.

It was events in Jerusalem which began the latest Israeli military offensive against the civilian population of Gaza, the 11-day killing spree which Israel unleashed in May. For once, that much seemed clear to all.

Increased tension over the expulsions fed into more violent Israeli extremism. Kahanist settlers began roaming the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to the Arabs” and looking for Palestinians to beat up. Israeli forces increasingly began to target worshippers in Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a violation of all norms of freedom of worship and basic morality, not to mention religious sanctity.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The armed Palestinian factions in Gaza, led by Hamas, made the decision to respond to Israel’s aggression in Jerusalem. Their increasingly long-range missile technology made this possible. For the first time, Palestinian resistance rockets were able to strike everywhere across occupied historic Palestine.

The 11-day war that followed resulted in victory for the Palestinian resistance. The “Death to the Arabs” annual Jerusalem march was delayed and finally halted. It eventually went ahead earlier in June, but was curtailed, and marchers were prohibited from entering the Old City.

More than 250 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, including 67 children, but the Palestinians still regarded the outcome of the war as a victory. And with good reason. The objective victory conditions for an indigenous guerrilla resistance force are not the same as those for an invading, alien, military entity.

The resistance was able to inflict a serious cost on the coloniser, and impose a deterrence factor. The expulsions in Jerusalem were delayed by the colonisers’ courts. Israeli troops were unable to enter Gaza, as their commanders knew that many would be coming back in body bags, if at all. Ultra-right Israeli politicians like Itamar Ben Gvir complained that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was making the decision over who could parade through Jerusalem, after his “Death to the Arabs” march was curtailed for fear of repercussions from Gaza.

But now, with the world media’s turning away from Palestine once again, the threat of expulsion looms once more for many Palestinian families. As I write, Israel has started to demolish Palestinian homes and shops in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan. The long delayed court decision on Sheikh Jarrah is expected soon.

Palestinians expect no justice from the occupier’s racist courts. It is down to us to raise Palestine’s visibility again and impose costs on Israel for its crimes, forcing it to change course.

For us in the West, that means campaigns, demonstrations and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activism. Now more than ever the message is simple and very important: don’t look away from Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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—

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “UN calls on Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian Homes”