Residents of Sheik Jarrah, a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, are under threat of forced expulsion from homes they have lived in for generations. A number of Palestinian families, many of whom were already violently forced from their villages in what is now Israel, during the Nakba (or ‘catastrophe’) in 1948, are facing an Israeli court decision which would force them again to vacate their homes in favour of illegal Jewish settlers (from the US, Europe or elsewhere). This represents a wider and on-going attempt by Israel to Judaize East Jerusalem and completely empty the city of all its Palestinian residents. Captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 war, East Jerusalem (or Al Quds) is recognised as Palestinian occupied territory under international law as well as being the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The ethnic cleansing occurring in Sheik Jarrah is nothing new but represents the continuation of what began in 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were violently forced from their homes by fanatical Zionist militias such as the Irgun and the Lehi. The Irgun was led by a future Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who had fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939. These militias were responsible for numerous atrocities during this time, including the Deir Yassin massacre in which 100s of unarmed men, women, and children were murdered, with instances of other extreme violence including rape & mutilation also reported. The extreme violence which many civilian populations in Palestine were subjected to, as well as the fast spreading reports of these massacres, prompted 1000s of Palestinians to flee their homes in 100s of villages across Palestine, never to return. Subsequently, up to 600 Palestinian villages were intentionally destroyed by the Jewish militias in an effort to erase Palestinian history. Following this ethnic cleansing, the newly established Israeli government implemented a series of laws to ensure that no Palestinian could ever lay claim to their homes & property, or even return at all. Many of these Palestinians became residents in East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank or Gaza, or refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt where they remain to this day.
The scenes of forced expulsion & violence coming from Jerusalem this week represent a microcosm of the continuous ethnic cleansing of Palestine and this is happening all across the occupied territories in various forms. For example, a recent Israeli court decision to demolish an entire Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, named Al-Bustan, or regular demolitions of Palestinian communities in the West Bank on spurious grounds, as well as the theft and/or denial of basic sanitation & water sources for Palestinian communities in the Jordan valley make daily life there untenable.
Protests against the ethnic cleansing in Sheik Jarrah have been met with violence against both men and women from the militarized police, with 100s injured, and this has even extended to attacking peaceful worshippers at the Al-Aqsa mosque, the 3rd holiest site in Islam, in the centre of Jerusalem. In response, just yesterday 1000s of Palestinian citizens of Israel made the journey to Jerusalem in a show of solidarity with their fellow Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem. These Palestinians who, having survived the Nakba and now live in northern Israel, took dozens of buses to Jerusalem but were prevented from entering the city by the Israeli army. They were forced to march the remainder of the way and were joined by 1000s of other Palestinians in protesting against the forced expulsions, discriminatory laws and on-going occupation by Israel. These protests were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and skunk water by Israeli occupation forces, including the aforementioned Al Aqsa mosque being desecrated.
The protestors also called on the international community to assist in their struggle. These calls, however, were met with tepid statements from Western governments handwringing about ‘both sides’ and the need to ‘deescalate’ ‘tensions’, and of course, the customary pleas for a return to the ‘peace process’. This is a response that will be familiar to any observers of the Palestinian struggle against the occupation, and it is about as meaningful now as it was 30 years ago. The US, which has always held itself to be an independent, impartial mediator on the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’, issued a statement via the State Department along the same lines. This weak rhetoric is not matched by even the most basic action to stop the continuing violations of international law — the Biden administration’s decision to keep the US embassy to Israel in Jerusalem (originally moved from Tel Aviv under Trump), and the continual funding of Israeli crimes against humanity to the tune of $3 billion USD per year, are stark reminders of where the interests of the US really lie. A recent effort in the US to condition aid to Israel on human rights concerns is a small but positive step. However, this has faced vociferous opposition from those in Congress beholden to Israel. Biden himself has stated openly that if Israel didn’t exist, the US would have to invent an Israel to ‘protect our interests in the region’ — a clear demonstration of the strategic importance of Israel to the US in the Middle East.
To demonstrate the fanatical absurdity of all this and the ideology underpinning Zionism, just this week a video emerged of an Israeli settler with a strong Brooklyn accent, attempting to steal a Palestinian Jerusalemite’s home. In the video, the illegal settler says, “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it…so why are you yelling at me?”. Imagine living in your home for generations and one day an American or European comes along and says, ‘this is now my house, get out’. This is the daily reality facing Palestinians in Jerusalem: in constant fear that they will be forcibly expelled from their homes, all justified & wholly supported by a violent State apparatus, under an apartheid legal system which systematically discriminates against Palestinians, in favour of Jewish Israelis.
Or imagine being born into an open-air prison; a prison from which you can never leave, where you struggle to survive day-to-day in wretched conditions, barely able to feed your family or have a decent life. Now imagine that those who control this prison, regularly target your home for destruction, indiscriminately bombing heavily populated civilian areas, murdering whichever unfortunate souls happen to be there. Imagine when attempting to protest at the prison fence against this tyranny, men, women, and children are indiscriminately shot dead and maimed by snipers. The hopelessness, despair, and desolation at your complete and utter helplessness is overwhelming. This is life in Gaza for millions of Palestinians. Just today, a Palestinian family was wiped out, including three children, by an Israeli airstrike supposedly targeting Hamas commanders. As I write this, Israeli airstrikes are destroying entire residential blocks. This is not by accident — collective punishment has been an Israeli military tactic for decades. Neither is the slaughter of entire families an isolated incident, but a fact of life in Gaza under occupation. The most technologically advanced military in the Middle East, thanks to US taxpayer’s dollars, has a long and sordid history of murdering innocent men, women and children in what they call, ‘targeted strikes’. Many of these war crimes will be investigated by the International Criminal Court in a recent ruling that they do have jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.
Another way the Israeli authorities are attempting to Judaize Jerusalem is by surrounding Palestinian East Jerusalem with illegal settlements on stolen land and incorporating them into the municipality. These settlements have effectively cut off East Jerusalem (home to 200,000 Palestinians) from the West Bank and this reality has been further solidified by the illegal apartheid wall, which snakes it’s way through the West Bank, cutting off Jerusalem and indeed many other parts of Palestine in an Israeli effort to steal more land (see below map). For those Palestinian towns of which Jerusalem was once a core part of their communities, this is a loss of some cultural, religious, and economic, significance, not to mention a war crime under international law.
In the West Bank, this fanatical observance to Zionism plays out in a different way. Palestinian villages are increasingly surrounded and cut off from one another by illegal Israeli settlements (now numbering over 200 with approx. 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers) in the West Bank. These colonial outposts are connected by a rapidly growing network of super-highways which traverse, bisect and by-pass Palestinian towns & villages throughout the West Bank. In most cases, Palestinians are not permitted to use these roads and are confined to their isolated Bantustans, small population centres which are cut off from other communities. Furthermore, they are subjected to daily ritual humiliation and degradation at numerous Israeli military checkpoints dotted across the West Bank, as shown effectively in a recent Oscar-nominated short film, ‘The Present’ (available on Netflix). The natural expansion of Palestinian towns & villages is restricted by a myriad of discriminatory Israeli government planning rules — planning permission is rarely granted for the natural growth of these towns, and they are hemmed in by ‘security zones’, ‘green areas’, ‘nature reserves’, and the aforementioned highways. The declared goal of the illegal settlement expansion, the continual transfer of settlers into occupied territory, and the growth in related infrastructure, is to shape the ‘facts on the ground’, and make de-facto Israeli annexation of all the valuable, resource-rich areas a reality, while leaving the remaining scraps for Palestinians. These Palestinians can be controlled and subjugated easily within this set-up, and if warranted, used for cheap manual labour in illegal settlements. The Israeli government may even see fit to grant Palestinians a ‘state’ on what is remaining of the West Bank. For Palestinians, any hope of a viable, contiguous state is quickly disappearing (and according to many observers, has already gone) as the occupying Israeli regime makes this settler-colonial nightmare an irreversible reality.
However unlikely it is that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to this state of affairs, with resistance to the occupation only set to intensify over time, the racist Israeli regime seems determined to enact this vision of apartheid. The horrifying reality is that Israel chose expansion over peace decades ago in full knowledge of the likely consequences in terms of violence and loss of life that this would entail, mostly of course, for Palestinians. It is up to the international community to finally take concrete action to end these unfathomable crimes and severe injustices — how long will Palestinians have to endure persecution & violence under occupation before the world stands up?
It took a concerted and sustained international solidarity movement to end apartheid in South Africa. It will take a similar effort to force the hand of the international community to no longer tacitly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Human Rights Watch has recently called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its actions and reassess relations, following its finding that Israel had passed the threshold for crimes of apartheid and persecution*. Forming international solidarity movements will be key in this struggle. For example, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has made clear its complete support for Palestinian national rights and has formed strong connections with the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS offers a non-violent, Palestinian-led, grassroots movement modeled on the South African anti-apartheid movement of the same name, but this will not succeed without our support. We can all help in some way by taking responsibility for our own actions & those of our governments:
(1) Boycotting companies that are complicit in the occupation as well as refusing to purchase Israeli products.
(2) Pressuring companies and institutions to divest from profiting off the occupation.
(3) Pressuring our own governments to hold Israel accountable for repeated violations of international law through sanctions & diplomatic isolation.
(4) Developing or joining local grassroots movements in your own country expressing solidarity and taking action in support of Palestinian rights.
Words are no longer enough; it is time for concerted action to prevent more bloodshed and end the occupation of Palestine and related crimes against humanity. It is only when this happens, that Palestine will be free.
#BDS #FreePalestine #ApartheidIsrael
‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’.
Nelson Mandela
