Showing posts with label Boycott Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boycott Israel. Show all posts

Monday, August 14, 2023

Israel: Apartheid State


THE ABSURD TIMES 

EXTRA



We needed to get this out and shared. We are still at work on our examination of the MAGA gang, but this is important and the MAGA idiocy is simply blotting it out. You will remember that this is most like the explanation that MAGA really meant Make America White Again, but the phrase has now been accepted in the corporate media. There will be more, but first you need to digest what is increasingly accepted by the majority of American Jews, Rabbis, Liberals, and voters, but staunchly referred to as "Anti-Semitic" to most lawmakers in our system. The force behind this is money. The fact that many MAGA types are genuinely anti-Semitic merely helps Zionist forces. Here it is:



Aparthied State – Israelis

Extra


Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - The Israel Lobby's Useful Idiot

CHRIS HEDGES

AUG 12

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The Kennedy Promise - by Mr. Fish


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The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of U.S. dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless.


Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars. The crude rockets fired at Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations — a war crime because they target civilians — are not remotely comparable to the 2,000 pound "bunker-buster" Mark-84 bombs with a "kill radius" of over 32 yards and which "create a supersonic wave of pressure when they explode" that have been dropped by Israel on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, the thousands of Palestinian killed and wounded and the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure, including electrical grids and water purification plants.


Palestinians in Gaza live in an open air prison that is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. They are denied passports and travel documents.


Malnutrition is endemic in the Occupied Territories. "High proportions" of the Palestinian population are "deficient in vitamins A, D, and E, which play key roles in vision, bone health, and immune function," according to a 2022 World Bank report. The report also notes that over 50 percent of those aged six to 23 in Gaza and over half of its pregnant women are anemic and "more than a quarter of pregnant women and more than a quarter of children aged 6–23 months [in the West Bank are] anemic."


Eighty-eight percent of Gaza's children suffer from depression, following 15 years of the Israeli blockade, according to a 2022 report from Save the Children and over 51 percent of children were diagnosed with PTSD following the third major war on Gaza in 2014. Only 4.3 percent of the water in Gaza is considered fit for human consumption. Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsanitary and overcrowded hovels. They often lack basic medical care. Unemployment rates are among the highest in the world at 46.6 percent.


Zionism's goal, since before Israel's inception, has been to displace Palestinians from their land and reduce those who remain to a struggle for basic subsistence, as Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe, notes:


10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew)...


Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine's native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants.


These political and historical facts, which I reported on as an Arabic speaker for seven years, four of them as The Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, are hard to ignore. Even from a distance.


I watched Israeli soldiers taunt boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle. The soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. In the Israeli lexicon this becomes children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on densely packed neighborhoods. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children, lined up in neat rows. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I watched Israel demolish homes and apartment blocks to create buffer zones between the Palestinians and Israeli troops. I interviewed destitute families camped in the rubble of their homes. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I stood in the bombed remains of schools as well as medical clinics and mosques. I heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as "human shields." Ironically, there is evidence of the Israeli military using Palestinians as human shields, which Israel's High Court deemed illegal in 2005.


There is a perverted logic to Israel's use of the Big Lie — Große Lüge. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.


There is a heavy political price to pay for defying Israel, whose overt interference in our political process makes the most tepid protests about Israeli policy a political death wish. The Palestinians are poor, forgotten and alone. And this is why the defiance of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is the central issue facing any politician who claims to speak on behalf of the vulnerable and the marginalized. To stand up to Israel has a political cost few, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you do stand up, it singles you out as someone who puts principles before expediency, who is willing to fight for the wretched of the earth and, if necessary, sacrifice your political future to retain your integrity. Kennedy fails this crucial test of political and moral courage.


Kennedy, instead, regurgitates every lie, every racist trope, every distortion of history and every demeaning comment about the backwardness of the Palestinian people peddled by the most retrograde and far-right elements of Israeli society. He peddles the myth of what Pappe calls "Fantasy Israel." This alone discredits him as a progressive candidate. It calls into question his judgment and sincerity. It makes him another Democratic Party hack who dances to the macabre tune the Israeli government plays.


Kennedy has vowed to make "the moral case for Israel," which is the equivalent of making the moral case for apartheid South Africa. He repeats, almost verbatim, talking points from the Israeli propaganda playbook put together by the Republican pollster and political strategist, Frank Luntz. The 112-page study, marked "not for distribution or publication," which was leaked to Newsweek, was commissioned by The Israel Project. It was written in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009 — when 1,387 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed.


The strategy document is the blueprint for how Israeli politicians and lobbyists sell Israel. It exposes the wide gap between what Israeli politicians say and what they know to be the truth. It is tailored to tell the outside world, especially Americans, what they want to hear. The report is required reading for anyone attempting to deal with the Israeli propaganda machine.


The document, for example, suggests telling the outside world that Israel "has a right to defensible borders," but advises Israelis to refuse to define what the borders should be. It advises Israeli politicians to justify the refusal by Israel to allow 750,000 Palestinians and their descendants, who were expelled from their country during the 1948 war, to return home, although the right of return is guaranteed under international law, by referring to this right as a "demand." It also recommends arguing that Palestinians are seeking mass migrations to seize land inside Israel. It suggests mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Iraq, Syria and Egypt, who fled anti-Semitism and violence in the Arab world after the creation of the Jewish state. The document recommends saying these refugees also "left property behind," in essence justifying the Israeli pogrom by the pogrom Arab states carried out after 1948. It recommends blaming the poverty among Palestinians on "Arab nations" that have not provided "a better life for Palestinians."


What is most cynical about the report is the tactic of expressing a faux sympathy for the Palestinians, who are blamed for their own oppression.


"Show Empathy for BOTH sides!" the document reads. "The goal of pro-Israel communications is not simply to make people who already love Israel feel good about that decision. The goal is to win new hearts and minds for Israel without losing the support Israel already has." It says that this tactic will "disarm" audiences.


I doubt Kennedy has read or heard of Luntz's report. But he has been spoon-fed its talking points and naively spits them back. Israel only wants peace. Israel does not engage in torture. Israel is not an apartheid state. Israel gives Israeli Arabs political and civic rights they do not have in other parts of the Middle East. Palestinians are not deliberately targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel respects civil liberties and gender and marriage rights. Israel has "the best judiciary in the world."


Kennedy makes other claims, such as his bizarre statement that the Palestinian Authority pays Palestinians to kill Jews anywhere in the world along with falsifications of elemental Middle Eastern history, which are so absurd I will ignore them. But I list below examples from the volumes of evidence that implode the Luntz-inspired talking points Kennedy repeats on behalf of the Israel lobby, not that any evidence can probably puncture his self-serving attachment to "Fantasy Israel."


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Apartheid


The 2017 U.N. report: "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid" concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole." Since 1967, Palestinians as a people have lived in what the report refers to as four "domains," in which the fragments of the Palestinian population are ostensibly treated differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from the apartheid regime.


Those domains are:


1. Civil law, with special restrictions, governing Palestinians who live as citizens of Israel;


2. Permanent residency law governing Palestinians living in the city of Jerusalem;


3. Military law governing Palestinians, including those in refugee camps, living since 1967 under conditions of belligerent occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip;


4. Policy to preclude the return of Palestinians, whether refugees or exiles, living outside territory under Israel's control.


On 19 July 2018, the Israeli Knesset voted "to approve the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, constitutionally enshrining Jewish supremacy and the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people," the Haifa-based civil liberties group Adalah explained. It is the supreme law in Israel "capable of overriding any ordinary legislation."


In 2021 Israeli human rights group B'Tselem published its report "A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid."


The report reads:


In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians. A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.


Jewish citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding the Gaza Strip). The Green Line means next to nothing for them: whether they live west of it, within Israel's sovereign territory, or east of it, in settlements not formally annexed to Israel, is irrelevant to their rights or status.


Where Palestinians live, on the other hand, is crucial. The Israeli regime has divided the area into several units that it defines and governs differently, according Palestinians different rights in each. This division is relevant to Palestinians only…Israel accords Palestinians a different package of rights in every one of these units — all of which are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens.


"Since 1948," the reports continues, "Israel has taken over 90% of land within its sovereign territory and built hundreds of Jewish communities, yet not one for Palestinians (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population, after dispossessing them of most of their property rights)," the report reads.


"Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the Occupied Territories, dispossessing Palestinians of more than 2,000 km2 on various pretexts. In violation of international law, it has built over 280 settlements in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) for more than 600,000 Jewish citizens. It has devised a separate planning system for Palestinians, designated primarily to prevent construction and development, and has not established a single new Palestinian community."


Targeting Civilians


Contrary to Kennedy's claims that "the policy of the Israeli military is to always only attack military targets," the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military, and other branches of the Israeli security apparatus, has been extensively documented by Israeli and international organizations.


The 2010 Goldstone report, which is over 500 pages, investigated Israel's 22-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from Dec. 27, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. The United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament endorsed the report.


The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. Three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets fired into Israel during the assault.


The report's key findings include that:


Numerous instances of Israeli lethal attacks on civilians and civilian objects were intentional, including with the aim of spreading terror, that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields and that such tactics had no justifiable military objective.


Israeli forces engaged in the deliberate killing, torture and other inhuman treatment of civilians and deliberately caused extensive destruction of property, outside any military necessity, carried out wantonly and unlawfully.


Israel violated its duty to respect the right of Gaza's population to an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, water and housing.


On 14 June of this year, B'Tselem reported that "Top Israeli officials" are "criminally liable for knowingly" ordering airstrikes which were "expected to harm civilians, including children, in the Gaza Strip."


Contrary to the myth propagated by Kennedy, reports and investigations, both by the U.N. as well as by rights groups, domestic and international, routinely cover suspected or known violations by Palestinian militants when they investigate alleged war crimes. As B'Tselem noted in the same 2019 report, in total, four Israelis were killed and 123 wounded.


Last month, the U.N.'s expert on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Italian international lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese, presented her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. It makes for very grim reading.


Deprivation of liberty has been a central element of Israel's occupation since its inception. Between 1967-2006 Israel has incarcerated over 800,000 Palestinians in the occupied territory. Although spiking during Palestinian uprisings, incarceration has become a quotidian reality. Over 100,000 Palestinians were detained during the First Intifada (1987-1993), 70,000 during the Second Intifada (2000-2006), and over 6,000 during the 'Unity Intifada' (2021). Approximately 7,000 Palestinians, including 882 children, were arrested in 2022. Currently, almost 5,000 Palestinians, including 155 children, are detained by Israel, 1,014 of them without charge or trial.


Torture


Around 1,200 complaints "alleging violence in Shin Bet [The Israeli Security Agency] interrogations" were filed between 2001 and 2019, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.


"Zero indictments have been brought," the committee reports. "This is yet another illustration of the complete systemic impunity enjoyed by the Shin Bet's interrogators."


Coercive methods include sexual harassment and humiliation, beatings, stress positions imposed for hours and interrogations that lasted as long as 19 hours as well as threats of violence against family members.


"They said they would kill my wife and children. They said they would cancel my mother's and sister's permits for medical treatments," one survivor said in 2016. "I couldn't sleep because even when I was in my cell, they would wake me up every 15 minutes… I couldn't tell the difference between day and night… I still scream in my sleep," another said in 2017.


The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, expressed "his utmost concern" after a December 2017 ruling by Israel's Supreme Court exempting security agents from criminal investigation despite their undisputed use of coercive "pressure techniques" against a Palestinian detainee, Assad Abu Gosh. He called the ruling a "license to torture."


Abu Gosh "was reportedly subjected to ill-treatment including beatings, being slammed against walls, having his body and fingers bent and tied into painful stress positions and sleep deprivation, as well as threats, verbal abuse, and humiliation. Medical examinations confirm that Mr. Abu Gosh suffers from various neurologic injuries resulting from the torture he suffered."


Civil Liberties

In the November 2022 elections in Israel, a far-right theocratic, nationalist and openly racist coalition took power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, "Jewish Power," party, is the Minister of National Security. Otzma Yehudit is populated with former members of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Kach party, which was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing a "Nazi-like ideology" that included advocating the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as all Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. His appointment, along with that of other far-right ideologues, including Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal Zionists used to defend Israel — that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism.


The new coalition government is reportedly preparing legislation that would be used to disqualify almost all Palestinian/Arab Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament, as well as ban their parties from standing in elections. The recent judicial "reforms" gut the independence and oversight of the Israeli courts. The government has also proposed shutting down Kan, the public broadcasting network, although that has been amended to fixing its "flaws". Smotrich, who opposes LGBTQ rights and refers to himself as a "fascist homophobe," said on Tuesday he would freeze all funds to Israel's Palestinian communities and East Jerusalem.


Israel has promulgated a series of laws to curtail public freedoms, brand all forms of Palestinian resistance as terrorism, and label supporters of Palestinian rights, even if they are Jewish, as anti-Semites. The amendment of one of Israel's principle apartheid laws, the 2010 "Village Committees Law," grants neighborhoods with up to 700 households the right to reject people from moving in to "preserve the fabric" of the community. Israel has over 65 laws that are used to discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the Occupied Territories.


Israel's Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.


Interreligious marriage in Israel is also prohibited.


As explained by Jacob N. Simon, who served as the President of the Jewish Legal Society at the Michigan State University College of Law:


The combination of the blood line related requirements to be considered Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinical Court and the restriction of marriage requiring religious ceremonies shows an intent







to maintain race purity. At its core, this is no different than the desire for pure blooded Aryans in Nazi Germany or pure blooded whites in the Jim Crow Southern United States.


Those who support these discriminatory laws and embrace Israeli apartheid are blinded by willful ignorance, racism or cynicism. Their goal is to dehumanize Palestinians, champion an intolerant Jewish chauvinism and entice the naïve and the gullible into justifying the unjustifiable. Kennedy, bereft of a moral compass and a belief system rooted in verifiable fact, has not only failed the Palestinians, he has failed us.

Monday, May 24, 2021

Back to Square one

THE ABSURD TIMES





llustration: Latuff


A CEASE-FIRE?

BY

Jack London


(No real point to that – I just wanted to see his name again.)

There has been a great deal of fuss over Hamas and Gaza, bombs going back and forth, a ceasefire, and so forth that we have lost track of what started all of this in the first place. We have been led to believe that everything is all nice and settled now. What they are not telling you is that what started this whole thing is still going on and continuing. Here is an account of that:


From Democracynow.org


The United Nations is appealing to the world to address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza following the 11-day Israeli assault that killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and injured more than 1,700 people. The U.N. is estimating that at least 6,000 residents of Gaza were left homeless after their homes were bombed by Israel, which has maintained a blockade on Gaza for the past 14 years. Tensions also remain high in Jerusalem, where dozens of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli security forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound Friday and Israeli authorities are continuing the campaign to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes so Jewish settlers can move in. Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet who is organizing to save his family's home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, says Israeli aggression against Palestinians has continued despite the ceasefire. "Colonial violence is still business as usual in occupied Palestine at large," El-Kurd says.

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STORYMay 21, 2021"We Want Real Dignity and Freedom": Gazans Welcome Ceasefire But Demand End of Siege & Occupation


GUESTS
  • Mohammed El-Kurd

    Palestinian writer and poet who is organizing to save his family's home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.


Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations is appealing to the world to address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is holding for a fourth day. The 11-day Israeli assault on Gaza killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, there. More than 1,700 people were injured. The U.N. is estimating at least 6,000 residents of Gaza were left homeless after their homes were bombed by Israel, which has maintained a blockade on Gaza for the past 14 years.

Meanwhile, tension remains high across the region. On Sunday, dozens of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli security forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-holiest site in Islam. On Friday, Israeli security forces fired stun guns and rubber bullets at Palestinians outside the mosque.

Israeli prosecutors have also filed terrorism charges against three Jewish men who pulled a Palestinian man out of his car in the city of Bat Yam two weeks ago and viciously beat him. A police official said, quote, "The three defendants engaged in inciting the mob before the victim arrived. They stole, looted from and destroyed stores owned by Arabs. When they saw an Arab, they carried out an extremely merciless beating," unquote. Some initial press reports had mistakenly said the victim was Jewish.

Meanwhile, in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli authorities are continuing their campaign to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes so Jewish settlers can move in.

We go now to Sheikh Jarrah, where we're joined by Mohammed El-Kurd. He's a Palestinian activist and poet who's organizing to save his family's home. His debut book, Rifqa, will be released by Haymarket Books later this year.

Mohammed, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the ceasefire, now in its fourth day, what it means and the wreckage in its wake? And then we'll talk about what's happening to you, your family and the other residents of Sheikh Jarrah.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Thank you. Thank you, Amy. It's good to be back.

I think the ceasefire means a lot of things. First, it means that the resistance, the Palestinian resistance, be it grassroots or otherwise, has been able to accomplish its own conditions, has been able to withstand a brutal nuclear superpower that is senselessly carpet-bombing a strip where people, 2 million people, are besieged. But in its fourth day, we are seeing that the Israeli authorities did not respect the ceasefire conditions. Al-Aqsa Mosque has been invaded more than once. There has been a mass arrest campaign, and Sheikh Jarrah is still under an illegal blockade. And colonial violence is still business as usual in occupied Palestine at large.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain in more detail what happened at the Al-Aqsa Mosque starting on Friday, and explain the significance of this mosque in Islam.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Well, Al-Aqsa Mosque, for Palestinians who are Muslim, it's the holiest site in Palestine, and it's the third-holiest site in Islam. And it is continuously raided and stormed by the Israeli police and army, the occupation forces working with Israeli settlers that are usually armed. And what happens is that oftentimes worshipers are met with brute force inside the mosque. This is stun grenades, rubber-coated bullets, sometimes live ammunition. People are detained, harassed, hit, brutalized.

And the images we have been seeing of this violence are not unique. What's been unique is that finally Palestinians are making noise about what's happening. We're finally recording, and the world is finally listening. Yesterday, over, I believe, a hundred-and-something Israeli settlers stormed the mosque to incite violence, to provoke Palestinians. And, of course, the occupation authorities ransacked the mosque, ransacked the worshipers and wounded many.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain Sheikh Jarrah — it seems now the world has heard about your neighborhood in East Jerusalem — your own situation, you and your twin sister Muna. I wanted to play that clip, that went viral, for people to understand what's taking place. But first, if you can put it into context? How is it possible that a Jewish settler has been living in your house for years? Go back in time.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Of course. I mean, I think there's two things to be said about Sheikh Jarrah: the then and the now. The then is that it is a microcosm of the Israeli reality, the Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine at large. It is absurd to people to hear that there's a settler from Long Island that's squatting in my house, but he wouldn't be able to do that without being emboldened by the Israeli occupation forces, by an Israeli judicial system that is inherently colonial and supremacist, and by American tax dollars. The person in my house has been there, much like many Israelis have inhabited homes that belong to Palestinians that were thrown out of them, that were massacred, that were forced to flee. And this is the situation in the entire neighborhood. You have settler organizations, that are registered in the United States, that are working and collaborating with the Israeli authorities to fabricate documents to throw out Palestinians. I think it's important to put in context that we are a community of refugees that is facing a billionaire-backed settler organization that is working in different countries.

And what's happening in Sheikh Jarrah is not just in Sheikh Jarrah. It's happening in Silwan, where more than 800 Palestinians are about to be made homeless and a hundred homes will be destroyed, demolished. It's happening in the South Hebron Hills. It's happening in Issawiya, where the Israeli authorities are building, quote-unquote, "national parks" to behave as colonial borders, to prevent natural community growth in Palestinian communities. There's many and a million ways in which Palestinians in Jerusalem are dispossessed. And sometimes it's a judicial system, sometimes it's artillery and weapons, and sometimes it's national parks. But it all behaves in the same way.

I also want to just make a quick note that Sheikh Jarrah has been under an illegal blockade for the past three weeks. No Palestinians — no Palestinians, not even medics, not even journalists —are allowed into the neighborhood, except the people that live there. And even those of us who live there are still harassed and questioned and shoved around. I've been shoved around more times than I can count. And that's been the same reality for other people. This is all happening. The neighborhood is blockaded, barricaded with cement barriers. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers can just walk in, no questions asked. And oftentimes, if not most of the time, they are armed with their rifles or pistols.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to that viral video showing your twin sister Muna confronting the Israeli settler who's been living in part of your home for 12 years.

MUNA EL-KURD: Jacob, you know this is not your house.
JACOB FAUCI: Yes, but if I go, you don't go back. So what's the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn't do this. I didn't do this.
MUNA EL-KURD: But you —
JACOB FAUCI: It's easy to yell at me, but I didn't do this.
MUNA EL-KURD: You are stealing my house.
JACOB FAUCI: And if I don't steal it, someone else is going to steal it.
MUNA EL-KURD: No, no one is allowed to steal it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this Jacob says, "If I don't steal it, someone else will." Where does he live in your house?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: So, he lives — so, the houses, the 28 houses of the Sheikh Jarrah housing project, were built in 1956. And we have built an extension to our house in the year 2000. The extension, of course, was closed immediately upon building, because 94% of building permits presented by Palestinians in Jerusalem get rejected. Actually, the councilman who rejects and accepts these permits is the same person that went viral for another video, saying that their goal is to make East Jerusalem like West Jerusalem, and if it happens at the expense of the Palestinians, it's no big deal. So, Jacob, from Long Island, Jacob Fauci, lives in that extension of my house and has lived there for, I think, a decade now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let's go to what happened in Gaza, the Hamas-Israel ceasefire. You've got over 200 Palestinians killed, over 240 Palestinians killed. About a quarter of them are children. More than 60 of those dead in Gaza are children, as a result of the Israeli bombardment. Now President Biden says that the U.S. will contribute to rebuilding Gaza. I want to play that clip for you. President Biden saying that they will contribute money, and, of course, the United Nations is also calling for a Gaza rebuilding fund. Your response?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I think — you know, I believe there was a condition that the resistance must be disarmed. And I just think it's ridiculous that the United States, of all countries, would talk about disarming what they call terrorism, when they have unleashed more terror onto the world than any other nation.

And I think if we're going to talk about disarming terrorism, I think Israel is a great place to start. The world seeing Gaza get carpet-bombed was a great presentation — of course, a heart-wrenching and terrible presentation, but nonetheless a good presentation — that the Israeli myth of self-defense is more and more penetrable, that they're not really defending against anything. And those manipulations of language, those red herrings they throw in the way of Palestinian advocacy, are not strong enough to contrast the images of them targeting densely populated civilian areas, are not strong enough to contrast the intent — the confessions made by Israeli officials about, you know, flattening the Strip or venting out their frustrations by leveling residential towers.

So, I think Israel is losing the battle in the public eye. And I hope no more Palestinians have to be killed before the world takes action against Israelis and against the Israeli authorities, the occupation authorities, who have been getting away with impunity for decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there an Israeli peace movement that is expressing solidarity with the Palestinians?

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: I don't think there's an Israeli peace movement that directly addresses the Israeli occupation authorities as a form of colonial violence. And I think that's where the issues stem. I think any Israeli peace movement's intentions are welcome, but they must reflect the wishes and the self-determination and the self-articulation of the Palestinian street, the voices of the Palestinian youth. And I don't think — I don't believe that's present nowadays.

AMY GOODMAN: The significance of the overall solidarity around the world, what that has meant for you? I mean, we just played a clip of someone in London. Something like 180,000 people protested. That was, rather — yes, that was in Paris.

MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Yes, Amy, that was — the videos in London and Paris, all over the world, have been heartwarming to me as a Palestinian and to many, many, many Palestinians, to see this huge, unprecedented shift in public opinion. And we know that it will have reverberations and accumulations in the coming future. We know that these protests are going to continue and be developed into actions and sanctions and boycotts and initiatives and letters. And I ask the people who are protesting to continue doing so, because we must the stubborn in the face of Israeli colonialism.

We're also already seeing punishment for these advocacy campaigns, for these protests. Fourteen hundred Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenships have already been arrested in the past two weeks. Yesterday, the Israeli authorities announced a campaign of what they called "law and order," where they will be arresting 500 more Palestinians to — and I quote — "even the score." Of course, no Israelis that took part in the lynch mobs were arrested or will be arrested in that campaign. To look at this mathematically, if you're arresting 500 Palestinians, that means you're terrorizing 500 families, 500 streets, where you'll be ransacking, raiding people's homes, terrorizing them.

This sends a clear message to us Palestinians who have been feeling a sense of national unity across historical Palestine: If you protest colonial violence, you'll be met with more colonial violence. But it is also — this campaign of, quote-unquote, "law and order" is also an indication that the Israeli occupation authorities are losing control.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohammed El-Kurd, I want to thank you for being with us, writer and poet from Jerusalem. He's organizing to save his family's home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.



Wednesday, May 19, 2021

PALESTINE POWER

THE ABSURD TIMES






Tsar

X


We could have been putting out a mammoth edition of all the reports from Palestine/Israel the last five days, but this is not a play by play deal here. Also, there is a great deal of manipulation going on. It is time to tell you why this is going on now. Zionists are going to bitch, so let them. This is true:


Well, as usual, I have my own view of what is going on in Israel. Netenyahu is much like Trump, protected just so long as he can maintain power. Four or five times there have been elections recently in Israel and Netenyahu has not been able to become official ruler. So, first he orders his army to invade the holy mosque in Jerusalem during their hold month. Then, on the Eid, sort of a celebration for Islam, he encourages settlers to take over homes that Palestinians had lived in and legally owned for over 50 years. We should note that all of this is made possible by the last administration, Trump Republicans, the GQP, in actually moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netenyahu's idea is that this take over would help him win the next election. It would also keep him out of prison as he is guilty of several corruption charges.


Meanwhile, you need to know that Gaza and the occupied West Bank are two separate ruling entities in the Palestinian