Sheikh Jarrah: Israeli far-right settlers raid house of Palestinian activist

Far-right settlers raided the home of a prominent Palestinian activist in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem on Tuesday, according to a local news agency. The Quds News Agency reported that Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right member of the Knesset, was among a group of Israeli settlers who entered the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood and threatened a number of families with expulsion. One of the house owners, Saleh Diab, told the agency that settlers - escorted by Israeli security services - tried to storm three houses belonging to his family, as well as the Kurd and Qasem families. He said the owners of the houses tried to respond with physical force. Mohammed el-Kurd, a prominent Palestinian activist, tweeted that the director of Nahalat Shimon, a US-based pro-settler organisation, had "invaded" his home. "Tell me again how this is a 'real estate dispute' and not systemic colonisation," he wrote. Threat of expulsion The incident came a day after more than 20 Palestinians were injured on Monday evening during a raid by Israeli forces on the neighbourhood. Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah are facing forcible expulsion to make way for Israeli settlers to take over their houses. The area has become a focal point for protests and sit-in solidarity activities, drawing in Palestinian and anti-occupation Israeli and international activists in support of Sheikh Jarrah's residents. The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Monday that 21 people had been injured in the area, 13 from inhaling tear gas, three from being pepper-sprayed and two from being hit by rubber-coated metal bullets fired by Israeli forces. The organisation said two people had sustained injuries from being beaten, while an elderly man was hospitalised following a head injury. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that settlers in Sheikh Jarrah threw stones at one of their ambulances, while Israeli forces sprayed another ambulance with skunk water. Israeli police said that a settler sustained an injury in her back from a stone, Haaretz reported. Kurd said on Twitter that the attacks were not isolated incidents. "The whole damn system is made up of settlers. The politicians are settlers, the corporations are run by settlers. Settler judges. Laws written by settlers," he wrote.

Sheikh Jarrah: Israeli forces injure more than 20 Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem

More than 20 Palestinians were injured on Monday evening during a raid by Israeli forces on the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah are facing forcible expulsion from their homes to make way for Israeli settlers to take over their houses. The area has become a focal point for protests and sit-in solidarity activities, drawing in Palestinian and anti-occupation Israeli and international activists in support of Sheikh Jarrah's residents. The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Monday that 21 people had been injured in the area, 13 from inhaling tear gas, three from being pepper-sprayed and two from being hit by rubber-coated metal bullets fired by Israeli forces. The organisation said two people had sustained injuries from being beaten, while an elderly man was hospitalised following a head injury. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that settlers in Sheikh Jarrah threw stones at one of their ambulances, while Israeli forces sprayed another ambulance with skunk water. Israeli police said that a settler sustained an injury in her back from a stone, Haaretz reported. Saleh Diab, a Palestinian activist, told the official Palestinian news agency Wafa that Israeli forces had arrested two Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, while firing stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets, and had assaulted residents with batons while storming the homes of the al-Kurd and al-Qasem families, who are facing imminent eviction. West Bank arrests In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces arrested 35 Palestinians during raids on Monday evening and Tuesday morning. Such night raids of Palestinian towns and villages are carried out almost daily by Israeli forces and undercover units. In Qarawat Bani Hassan village, in the north of the West Bank, 14 Palestinians, 12 of them belonging to the Marei family, were arrested during the raids, according to Wafa. Al-Aqsa: Israeli settlers break into mosque as 35th Palestinian killed in West Bank Read More » Seven Palestinians in Jenin and two in Tulkarm were also detained, while in the Silwan neighbourhood, south of al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, 10 Palestinians were arrested. The arrests came as Israeli settlers on Monday broke into al-Aqsa Mosque, flanked by Israeli police. Settlers entered the site from the Morrocan Gate, east of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which leads to the Western Wall piazza, where Israelis perform prayers. The Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the Palestinian religious trust that administers the site, said that the settlers had performed Jewish prayers opposite al-Rahmeh Gate, and the mosque of the Dome of the Rock, and had received a talk about the Third Jewish Temple. Despite being forbidden from praying there, settlers regularly enter Al-Aqsa Mosque, aiming to strengthen the Jewish presence on the site, with some calling for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock mosque to build a Jewish temple in its place.

There’s Nothing Complicated About What’s Happening in Palestine BY ASIA KHATUN

the past few weeks have seen settler colonialism in action, as a Jerusalem District Court ruling demanded the expulsion of a number of Palestinian families from their homes in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem. These same Palestinians, displaced from Yafa and Haifa in 1956 under a Jordanian mandate, were set to be forcefully removed from their homes by settlers with the enforcement of the Israeli police force, although the higher ruling on the expulsions has now been delayed. Naturally, this sparked outrage and led to many families and locals mobilizing to protest yet another step toward the annexation of East Jerusalem. A stone’s throw away, in Al-Aqsa Mosque, worshippers attending night prayers in the holy month of Ramadan were met with sound bombs and tear gas deployed by armed soldiers. The violence has now escalated to rocket fire from Hamas and Israel’s air strikes. As of Tuesday, these incidents had resulted in the death of twenty-four Palestinians, including nine children, and hundreds injured, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Many mainstream news outlets have phrased these recent events as a “clash” or a “conflict” over “evictions,” headlining words that contribute to a linguistic environment known far too well. These words are successful in one thing: the whitewashing and downplaying of a neo-colonialist ethnostate, making the continued oppression of Palestinians and denial of their human rights an international normality. The normalization of colonialism begins where it always has: in language. These language choices, be they irresponsible or just ignorant, reinforce the notion that this is a conflict in which both sides have the means to be equally violent toward each other. But the fact of the matter is that Israel is one of the most militarized occupying nations in the world, backed with billions of dollars and weapons from the United States. The power dynamic that Western society at large believes in simply does not exist, and the lack of understanding is a consequence of decades’ worth of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which deflects the conversation away from the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The mainstream media is habitually attached to diverting almost every conversation about the death of Palestinians toward Hamas and its rockets. On the morning of May 11, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot, was on BBC Newsnight, explaining that the reactionary measures of the group (which was initially financed by Israel in its desperation to counter the secularists in the Palestinian Liberation Organization) should not outweigh the human rights violations that occur on a daily basis and result in a growing death toll. Palestine does not find itself in a power vacuum suddenly governed by Hamas: it is an intentionally destabilized region, much of which functions as an open-air prison for Israel to control. This repetitive line of questioning tends toward gaslighting, whether intentional or otherwise, and the widespread refusal to acknowledge Israel’s criminal actions are part of how the occupation has metastasized into a paradox: in one instance, these “clashes” are reported in a sensationalist frenzy; in another, the death of Palestinians is a regular and mundane occurrence. In the UK, center-left politicians have refused to take a strong stance against the apartheid government. Days after Jeremy Corbyn implored President Joe Biden to apply “enormous pressure and influence on the Israeli government,” Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, tweeted a lukewarm acknowledgment of the violence. Starmer’s request for the Israeli government to “work with Palestinian leaders to de-escalate tensions” conforms to the perception that the Israeli government wants to work with Palestinian leaders — but only a year ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed, “We are the ones dictating security rules . . . They will remain Palestinian subjects.” The consequence of this linguistic wrangling is that Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land, which breaks international law, becomes palatable. Palestinians have attempted to combat this suppression via social media with videos and hashtags, such as #SaveSheikhJarrah, documenting the graphic brutality unfolding around them. But many have been met with censorship: some posts were hidden, and others were deleted. The silencing of dissent through the digital sphere is yet another dangerous form of systemic control, negating freedom of speech and limiting the freedom of the press. Israel’s actions center around a dogma with which neo-colonialists can all align themselves. When it commits its crimes, the refusal to see illegality and inhumanity in its ongoing occupation of Palestine becomes the standard. The colonizer has been the protagonist in our media discourse for so long that the words write themselves. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is sinister in all its forms, but the manipulation of language to turn a people whose dignity and humanity has been stripped for over seventy years into villains is particularly abhorrent.

On ‘Conflict’, ‘Peace’ and ‘Genocide’: Time for New Language on Palestine and Israel BY RAMZY BAROUD

On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza. “I have reflected and wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding, “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.” But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of ‘hyperbole’? To avoid pointless social media spats, one only needs to reference the ‘United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’. According to Article 2 of the 1948 Convention, the legal definition of genocide is: “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part …” In its depiction of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, the Geneva-based human rights group, Euro-Med Monitor, reported: “The Israeli forces directly targeted 31 extended families. In 21 cases, the homes of these families were bombed while their residents were inside. These raids resulted in the killing of 98 civilians, including 44 children and 28 women. Among the victims were a man and his wife and children, mothers and their children, or child siblings. There were seven mothers who were killed along with four or three of their children. The bombing of these homes and buildings came without any warning despite the Israeli forces’ knowledge that civilians were inside.” As of May 28, 254 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and 1,948 were wounded in the latest 11-day Israeli onslaught, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Though tragic, this number is relatively small compared with the casualties of previous wars. For example, in the 51-day Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, over 2,200 Palestinians were killed and over 17,000 were wounded. Similarly, entire families, like the 21-member Abu Jame family in Khan Younis, also perished. Is this not genocide? The same logic can be applied to the killing of over 300 unarmed protesters at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel between March 2018 and December 2019. Moreover, the besiegement and utter isolation of over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza since 2006-07, which has resulted in numerous tragedies, is an act of collective punishment that also deserves the designation of genocide. One does not need to be a legal expert to identify the many elements of genocide in Israel’s violent behavior, let alone language, against Palestinians. There is a clear, undeniable relationship between Israel’s violent political discourse and equally violent action on the ground. Potentially Israel’s next prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who has served the role of Defense Minister, had, in July 2013, stated: “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.” With this context in mind, and regardless of why Ruffalo found it necessary to back-track on his moral position, Israel is an unrepentent human rights violator that continues to carry out an active policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the native, indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Language matters, and in this particular ‘conflict’, it matters most, because Israel has, for long, managed to escape any accountability for its actions, due to its success in misrepresenting facts, and the overall truth about itself. Thanks to its many allies and supporters in mainstream media and academia, Tel Aviv has rebranded itself from being a military occupier and an apartheid regime to an ‘oasis of democracy’, in fact, ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. This article will not attempt to challenge the entirety of the misconstrued mainstream media’s depiction of Israel. Volumes are required for that, and Israeli Professor Ilan Pappé’s ‘Ten Myths about Israel’ is an important starting point. However, this article will attempt to present some basic definitions that must enter the Palestine-Israel lexicon, as a prerequisite to developing a fairer understanding of what is happening on the ground. A Military Occupation – Not a ‘Conflict’ Quite often, mainstream Western media refers to the situation in Palestine and Israel as a ‘conflict’, and to the various specific elements of this so-called conflict as a ‘dispute’. For example, the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ and the ‘disputed city of East Jerusalem’. What should be an obvious truth is that besieged, occupied people do not engage in a ‘conflict’ with their occupiers. Moreover, a ‘dispute’ happens when two parties have equally compelling claims to any issue. When Palestinan families of East Jerusalem are being forced out of their homes which are, in turn, handed over to Jewish extremists, there is no ‘dispute’ involved. The extremists are thieves and the Palestinians are victims. This is not a matter of opinion. The international community itself says so. ‘Conflict’ is a generic term. Aside from absolving the aggressor – in this case, Israel – it leaves all matters open for interpretation. Since American audiences are indoctrinated to love Israel and hate Arabs and Muslims, siding with Israel in its ‘conflict’ with the latter becomes the only rational option. Israel has sustained a military occupation of 22% of the total size of historic Palestine since June 1967. The remainder of the Palestinian homeland was already usurped, using extreme violence, state-sanctioned apartheid, and, as Pappé puts it, ‘incremental genocide’ decades earlier. From the perspective of international law, the term ‘military occupation’, ‘occupied East Jerusalem’, ‘illegal Jewish settlements’ and so forth, have never been ‘disputed’. They are simply facts, even if Washington has decided to ignore international law, and even if mainstream US media has chosen to manipulate the terminology as to present Israel as a victim, not the aggressor. ‘Process’ without ‘Peace’ The term ‘peace process’ was coined by American diplomats decades ago. It was put to use throughout the mid and late 1970s when, then-US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, labored to broker a deal between Egypt and Israel in the hope of fragmenting the Arab political front and, eventually, sidelining Cairo entirely from the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’. Kissinger’s logic proved vital for Israel as the ‘process’ did not aim at achieving justice according to fixed criteria that has been delineated by the United Nations for years. There was no frame of reference any more. If any existed, it was Washington’s political priorities which, historically, almost entirely overlapped with Israel’s priorities. Despite the obvious American bias, the US bestowed upon itself the undeserving title of ‘the honest peace broker’. This approach was used successfully in the write-up to the Camp David Accords in 1978. One of the Accords’ greatest achievements is that the so-called ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ was replaced with the so-called ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’. Now, tried and true, the ‘peace process’ was used again in 1993, resulting in the Oslo Accords. For nearly three decades, the US continued to tout its self-proclaimed credentials as a peacemaker, despite the fact that it pumped – and continues to do so – $3-4 billion of annual, mostly military, aid to Israel. On the other hand, the Palestinians have little to show for. No peace was achieved; no justice was obtained; not an inch of Palestinian land was returned and not a single Palestinian refugee was allowed to return home. However, American and European officials and a massive media apparatus continued to talk of a ‘peace process’ with little regard to the fact that the ‘peace process’ has brought nothing but war and destruction for Palestine, and allowed Israel to continue its illegal appropriation and colonization of Palestinian land. Resistance, National Liberation – Not ‘Terrorism’ and ‘State-Building’ The ‘peace process’ introduced more than death, mayhem and normalization of land theft in Palestine. It also wrought its own language, which remains in effect to this day. According to the new lexicon, Palestinians are divided into ‘moderate’ and ‘extremists’. The ‘moderates’ believe in the American-led ‘peace process’, ‘peace negotiations’ and are ready to make ‘painful compromises’ in order to obtain the coveted ‘peace’. On the other hand, the ‘extremists’ are ‘Iran-backed’, politically ‘radical’ bunch that use ‘terrorism’ to satisfy their ‘dark’ political agendas. But is this the case? Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, many sectors of Palestinian society, including Muslims and Christians, Islamists and secularists and, notably, socialists, resisted the unwarranted political ‘compromises’ undertaken by their leadership, which they perceived to be a betrayal of Palestinians’ basic rights. Meanwhile, the ‘moderates’ have largely ruled over Palestinians with no democratic mandate. This small but powerful group introduced a culture of political and financial corruption, unprecedented in Palestine. They applied torture against Palestinian political dissidents whenever it suited them. Not only did Washington say little to criticize the ‘moderate’ Palestinian Authority’s dismal human rights record, but it also applauded it for its crackdown on those who ‘incite violence’ and their ‘terrorist infrastructure’. A term such as ‘resistance’ – muqawama – was slowly but carefully extricated from the Palestinian national discourse. The term ‘liberation’ too was perceived to be confrontational and hostile. Instead, such concepts as ‘state-building’ – championed by former Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and others – began taking hold. The fact that Palestine was still an occupied country and that ‘state-building’ can only be achieved once ‘liberation’ was first secured, did not seem to matter to the ‘donor countries’. The priorities of these countries – mainly US allies who adhered to the American political agenda in the Middle East – was to maintain the illusion of the ‘peace process’ and to ensure ‘security coordination’ between PA police and the Israeli army carried on, unabated. The so-called ‘security coordination’, of course, refers to the US-funded joint Israeli-PA efforts at cracking down on Palestinian resistance, apprehending Palestinian political dissidents and ensuring the safety of the illegal Jewish settlements, or colonies, in the occupied West Bank. War and, Yes, Genocide in Gaza – Not ‘Israel-Hamas Conflict’ The word ‘democracy’ was constantly featured in the new Oslo language. Of course, it was not intended to serve its actual meaning. Instead, it was the icing on the cake of making the illusion of the ‘peace process’ perfect. This was obvious, at least to most Palestinians. It also became obvious to the whole world in January 2006, when the Palestinian faction Fatah, which has monopolized the PA since its inception in 1994, lost the popular vote to the Islamic faction, Hamas. Hamas, and other Palestinian factions have rejected – and continue to reject – the Oslo Accords. Their participation in the legislative elections in 2006 took many by surprise, as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was itself a product of Oslo. Their victory in the elections, which was classified as democratic and transparent by international monitoring groups, threw a wrench in the US-Israeli-PA political calculations. Lo and behold, the group that has long been perceived by Israel and its allies as ‘extremist’ and ‘terrorist’, became the potential leaders of Palestine! The Oslo spin doctors had to go into overdrive in order for them to thwart Palestinian democracy and ensure a successful return to the status quo, even if this meant that Palestine is represented by unelected, undemocratic leaders. Sadly, this has been the case for nearly 15 years. Meanwhile, Hamas’ stronghold, the Gaza Strip, had to be taught a lesson, thus the siege imposed on the impoverished region for nearly 15 years. The siege on Gaza has little to do with Hamas’ rockets or Israel’s ‘security’ needs, the right to ‘defend itself’, and its supposedly ‘justifiable’ desire to destroy Gaza’s ‘terrorist infrastructure’. While, indeed, Hamas’ popularity in Gaza is unmatched anywhere else in Palestine, Fatah, too, has a powerful constituency there. Moreover, the Palestinian resistance in the Strip is not championed by Hamas alone, but also by other ideological and political groups, for example, the Islamic Jihad, the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other socialist and secular groups. Misrepresenting the ‘conflict’ as a ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas is crucial to Israeli propaganda, which has succeeded in equating Hamas with militant groups throughout the Middle East and even Afghanistan. But Hamas is not ISIS, Al-Qaeda or Taliban. In fact, none of these groups are similar, anyway. Hamas is a Palestinian Islamic nationalist movement that operates within a largely Palestinian political context. An excellent book on Hamas is the recently published volume by Daud Abdullah, Engaging the World. Abdullah’s book rightly presents Hamas as a rational political actor, rooted in its ideological convictions, yet flexible and pragmatic in its ability to adapt to national, regional and international geopolitical changes. But what does Israel have to gain from mischaracterizing the Palestinian resistance in Gaza? Aside from satisfying its propaganda campaign of erroneously linking Hamas to other anti-American groups, it also dehumanizes the Palestinian people entirely and presents Israel as a partner in the American global so-called ‘war on terror’. Israeli neofascist and ultranationalist politicians then become the saviors of humanity, their violent racist language is forgiven and their active ‘genocide’ is seen as an act of ‘self-defense’ or, at best, a mere state of ‘conflict’. The Oppressor as the Victim According to the strange logic of mainstream media, Palestinians are rarely ‘killed’ by Israeli soldiers, but rather ‘die’ in ‘clashes’ resulting from various ‘disputes. Israel does not ‘colonize’ Palestinian land; it merely ‘annexes’, ‘appropriates’, and ‘captures’, and so on. What has been taking place in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, for example, is not outright property theft, leading to ethnic cleansing, but rather a ‘property dispute’. The list goes on and on. In truth, language has always been a part of Zionist colonialism, long before the state of Israel was itself constructed from the ruins of Palestinian homes and villages in 1948. Palestine, according to the Zionists, was ‘a land with no people’ for ‘a people with no land’. These colonists were never ‘illegal settlers’ but ‘Jewish returnees’ to their ‘ancestral homeland’, who, through hard work and perseverance, managed to ‘make the desert bloom’, and, in order to defend themselves against the ‘hordes of Arabs’, they needed to build an ‘invincible army’. It will not be easy to deconstruct the seemingly endless edifice of lies, half-truths and intentional misrepresentations of Zionist Israeli colonialism in Palestine. Yet, there can be no alternative to this feat because, without proper, accurate and courageous understanding and depiction of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance to it, Israel will continue to oppress Palestinians while presenting itself as the victim.

New Israeli Government, Same Israeli Apartheid BY ARIEL GOLD

After 12 years, Israel finally inaugurated a new prime minister. While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuer of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s. In 2013, as Middle East peace talks were set to resume after a five-year freeze, Bennett reportedly proclaimed to Israeli National Security Adviser Ya’akov Amidror, “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.” In 2014, Bennett, who had previously been the director of the Yesha Settlements Council, contradicted Netanyahu by asserting that all Jewish Israelis living in the West Bank, even those living in outposts that violate Israeli law, should remain under Israeli sovereignty, and called for more settlement construction. “This is the time to act,” he said. “We must continue building in all corners of the Land of Israel, with determination and without being confused. We are building and we will not stop.” In 2016, as Israel’s Minister of Education, Bennett called on Israeli Jews to “give our lives” to annex the West Bank. While this might seem relatively innocuous, it was not. Bennett’s remarks invoked Kahanism, a Jewish supremacist ideology, based on the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane, that calls for violence and terrorism to be used to secure Israel as an ethno-nationalist state. In 1994, Israeli settler and Kahane follower Baruch Goldstein massacred Palestinians in the West Bank Ibrahimi mosque. In 1988, the Kach party was banned from running for the Israeli Knesset. In 2004, the US State Department labeled Kach a terrorist organization. Sunday, June 13, 2021, right before he was inaugurated to replace Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel, Bennett doubled down on his anti-Palestinian views proclaiming that his government would “strengthen settlements across the whole of the Land of Israel.” It’s not only on the Palestinian issue that Bennett is a far-right ideologue. Bennett uses his adherence to orthodox Judaism as cover for his opposition to gay marriage. “Judaism doesn’t recognize gay marriage, just as we don’t recognize milk and meat together as kosher, and nothing will change it,” he declared. Netanyahu, by contrast, touts himself as being pro-LGBTQ+ rights. As recently as 2018 he wrote: “I am proud to be the prime minister of one of the world’s most open and free democracies… Israel consistently upholds civil equality and civil rights of all its citizens regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.” So why then are progressive politicians and organizations responding so positively to the change in Israel? Bernie Sanders, known for his progressive stances and for being a congressional champion of Palestinian rights, said in a video that he was “hopeful” that the new government would be one “we will be better able to work with.” Americans for Peace Now, the sister organization of Shalom Achshav, Israel’s preeminent anti-settlement/pro-peace organization, released a statement that it “welcomes the swearing-in of Israel’s new government.” On Sunday night after the new government was sworn in, thousands of Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv — considered Israel’s bastion of secular liberalism — and celebrated into the night. One answer lies in how fed up people inside and outside of Israel had become with Netanyahu’s rule. His tenure was marred by corruption charges and shrewd maneuvers to remain in power, and what had become an endless cycle of Israeli elections, during which the government was paralyzed and unable to pass a budget for the past three years. The other answer, however, is that this was the best change that could be obtained from a government that prevents about five million people living under its rule from being able to vote. Here’s the situation: About 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian. They can vote in all Israeli elections and have representation in Knesset. This election saw the first Palestinian party join an Israeli majority government coalition. However, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship represent only about one-third of the Palestinians living under Israeli rule and military occupation. Though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, Israel is the absolute power in charge. Israel controls the borders, the currency, and the central bank. It collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA), maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land, and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted. Israel approves only about half of the permits that residents of Gaza apply for to travel outside of Gaza for vital medical treatment. In 2017, 54 people died while awaiting a permit to travel for medical treatment, leading to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, to release a joint statement calling for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted. Reasons for denying people in Gaza necessary medical treatment are often absurd, such as denying travel because a relative at one time moved from Gaza to the West Bank without Israeli permission. Even when not carrying out a massacre, such as the May 2021 one that killed 256 Palestinians, Israel regulates the fuel and building materials available to Gazans. At times, it has even controlled the number of food imports according to the number of calories Gazans should consume. Israel controls not only the exterior borders of the West Bank but what goes on inside as well. While the Palestinian Authority manages utilities and infrastructure for much of the West Bank, Israel is the ultimate authority. Israeli settler regional councils control 40% of West Bank land. Even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under complete Palestinian Authority control, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, close streets and shops, burst into homes, and make warrantless arrests. While the PA does maintain a judicial and penal system, one that itself is incredibly repressive, Palestinians are also subject to Israel’s military court system and laws such as Military Order 101, which bans peaceful protest. Though they are prosecuted in Israeli military courts and serve time in Israeli military prisons, Palestinians have no say over who is appointed to run the Israeli military, let alone the military courts. Jerusalem was captured by Israel in 1967 and formally, and illegally, annexed in 1980. Common sense might follow that Israel would have then absorbed the East Jerusalem Palestinians, now numbering around 370,000, and made them Israeli citizens. Rather than holding citizenship, however, Jerusalem Palestinians hold the status of permanent residents, allowing them to vote in municipal, but not national, elections. While this may at first seem a move in the right direction, a closer look reveals careful manipulation of demographics to ensure an at least a 70% Jewish majority at all times. Through such policies as exorbitant taxation, requiring constant proof of residency, and denial of family unification, since 1967 Israel has managed to revoke the residency of 14,595 Palestinian Jerusalemites. Right now Israel’s courts are in the process of ethnically cleansing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Before the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes and lands to establish the state of Israel, two Jewish trusts purchased a plot of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. When Israel was established, the Jewish families living in Sheikh Jarrah left for West Jerusalem as that section of the city was now part of the new state of Israel while East Jerusalem came under Jordanian and UN control. In 1956, Jordan and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees resettled 28 Palestinian families who had been forced out of their homes inside the new state of Israel into Sheik Jarrah. In exchange for giving up their rightful refugee status, the 28 families were to receive ownership of the Sheikh Jarrah properties, but they never got the deeds to their properties. Israel is now trying to return the properties to the Jewish trusts who later sold them to Nahalat Shimon, a real-estate company registered in the US state of Delaware. The kicker is that while Israel regularly uses this tactic to remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Israeli law bars Palestinians from recovering property they lost in the Nakba, even if they still reside in areas controlled by Israel. 2021 marks 54 years of occupation, including 14 years of the siege of Gaza, and 28 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords that were supposed to create a Palestinian state. 600,000 Israeli citizens now live in the approximately 200 illegal Israeli settlements that cover the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A breakdown of who is and isn’t allowed to vote between the Jordan river and the sea reveals Israel’s motivations: * Number of Jewish Israelis living in Israel proper, and East Jerusalem, and West Bank settlements: 6.589 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics) * Number of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Palestinians who can vote in national elections): 1.5 million (Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Jerusalem Municipality) * Number of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza who cannot vote in Israeli national elections: 4.88 million (Palestinian Authority Central Bureau of Statistics) As we get to know Israel’s new prime minister and government, as we continue to watch Israel forcibly remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem, as we worry about a next massacre in Gaza, and as we continue to hear the absurd label of Israel as a democratic state, let’s not forget that the right to vote is only granted to 60% of the total population and only one-third of Palestinians who live under Israeli rule had any say Naftali Bennett becoming Israel’s thirteenth prime minister. Ariel Gold is the national co-director for CODEPINK. Follow her on Twitter at @arielelysegold

How we conveniently ignore the ‘terrorists’ among our allies by Paul R. Pillar

The term “terrorist” often gets used as a general-purpose epithet intended to consign a disliked state or group to perpetual isolation and punishment. Used in this way, the label of “terrorist” becomes a substitute for careful analysis of policy toward the state or group in question. Usually, the object of the labeling has indeed used terrorism — but so have many others who don’t get labeled the same way and may even be treated as friends and allies. If the operative notion is “once a terrorist, always a terrorist,” then there are many shady histories that warrant examination. Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis. Begin’s terrorist campaign continued after the war. His group’s most spectacular operation was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 persons and injuring 46. The list of victims went far beyond the British administrators who were the purported targets and included people of multiple nationalities not only in the hotel but in adjacent buildings and the street. As the British exit neared, Begin’s group used more of its terrorist tactics against Palestinian Arabs, evidently aimed in part to terrorize Arabs into fleeing their homes and villages. An especially notorious operation was the massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, in which more than a hundred Arabs, including women and children, were killed. Begin emerged from the clandestine world after the creation of Israel as he established the right-wing Herut party in 1948. This did not erase his terrorist past — certainly not in the minds of the British, who barred him from making a visit to London in the 1950s. The British were not the only ones who took notice of what Begin represented. A trip by him to the United States in late 1948 elicited an open letter by Jewish dignitaries, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, protesting the visit and describing Herut as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Herut later became the core of the Likud Party — the party of Netanyahu and the dominant party in most governing coalitions in Israel over the past four decades. Begin’s successor as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, had a similar history. He was co-leader of another Jewish terrorist group of the 1940s: Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang after its founder, which was considered even more extreme than the Irgun. Besides also participating in the Deir Yassin massacre, Shamir’s group specialized in assassinations, including the murder in Cairo in 1944 of the British minister of state responsible for the Middle East. In September 1948, the group assassinated the Swedish diplomat and United Nations mediator for Palestine, Folke Bernadotte, notwithstanding Bernadotte’s diplomatic work during World War II that had won the release of many prisoners incarcerated by the Nazis. The apparent motive for the killing was the expectation that Bernadotte, who was responsible for developing a more stable formula for Jewish-Arab peace in Palestine, would make proposals that would not give the Jewish side everything it wanted regarding Jerusalem. The legacy of Begin and Shamir has lived on with Israeli terrorist operations that, as with the bombing of the King David Hotel, have taken out innocent victims. For example, in 1979 (when Begin was prime minister), an attack aimed at a leader of the Palestinian Black September organization used a car bomb in a busy Beirut street that killed not only the intended target and his bodyguards but also four bystanders, including a British student and a German nun, and injured 18 others. (Six years earlier, Israeli agents had killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they had mistaken for their Palestinian target.) Later chapters in the story of Israeli assassinations have included the murder of Iranian scientists, with the most recent killing taking place last November. Another Middle Eastern state that usually escapes the “terrorist” label despite a record of terrorist operations is Saudi Arabia, with the most glaring case being the butchering of a dissident journalist and U.S. resident in 2018 in a consulate in Turkey. The operation was almost certainly ordered from the top of the Saudi regime. A tactic, not a state or group Terrorism is a tactic. It is not a fixed set of bad guys, bad states, or bad groups. Use of the tactic is despicable but its use does not dictate a policy of ostracism and isolation, or any other specific policy, toward a regime that has used it. Whatever one thinks of Begin and Shamir, they became duly empowered prime ministers of Israel. It was necessary and proper for the United States and other countries to conduct business with them. Today, it is necessary and proper to conduct business with Israel and with Saudi Arabia, both of which are important states of the Middle East. Their terrorist practices should not preclude such business, although those practices can and should be raised as issues with those governments. The recent Israeli and Saudi uses of terrorist tactics run against one of the major trends in international terrorism over the past four decades, which has been a decline in state sponsorship and state practice of terrorism. Reasons for the decline include the costs of being a pariah in a globalized age and the inability to play one superpower against the other ever since the USSR collapsed. But what matters for any one state are the incentives and disincentives, the opportunities and lack of opportunities, and the penalties and pandering that it faces and that shape its decisions. The fact that some past state practitioners of terrorism have, amid changing incentives and changing circumstances, reduced or ended their use of the tactic (Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya is an outstanding example) refutes the notion that state-sponsored terrorism is a matter of certain “terrorist states” being hard-wired to indulge in the practice. That notion underlies the “once a terrorist, always a terrorist” approach often taken toward such states. And that approach leads to unfruitful ostracism rather than a management of incentives and circumstances that would make it less likely a state will engage in terrorism in the future. The hard-wire myth persists Unfortunately, the hard-wiring notion too often prevails. Iran probably is the state to which the notion is most often applied. The seemingly permanent tag of “number one state sponsor of terrorism” automatically rolls off the tongue and substitutes for any serious consideration of what, when, and why Iran has use terrorist techniques, let alone any serious consideration of what policies by other countries would tend to reduce such use in the future. Iran’s use of such techniques has changed substantially during the four decades of the Islamic Republic, especially with the curtailment of extraterritorial assassinations of political opponents — which were similar in many ways to the extraterritorial assassinations by Israel — after that practice got in the way of better relations between Iran and European states. The most conspicuous international terrorist operations that Iran attempted in later years were direct responses to similar clandestine Israeli attacks against Iran. Iran, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, is an important state in the Middle East. Whatever one thinks of its leaders or its political coloration, business needs to be conducted with it, on security, economic, and other matters. Merely slapping on the “terrorist state” label and using that as an excuse not to do business with Iran and to sanction it in perpetuity is not an effective way to deal with any issues involving Iran, including the terrorism issue itself. The Palestinian organization Hamas is a prime example of a non-state actor to which the hard-wiring assumption is often applied, and where the label “terrorist group” is taken to be the only thing we need to know about the organization to formulate policy toward it. And Hamas demonstrates, like many other states and groups, how false that assumption is. Yes, Hamas has used terrorism, but it has used other ways of pursuing its political objectives when circumstances have permitted, including competing in free and fair elections and negotiating with Israel to free prisoners and to establish and maintain armistices. Like it or not, it is a significant player in Palestinian politics and the closest thing to a local governing authority in the blockaded Gaza Strip. The case of Hamas illustrates another shortcoming of primitive reliance on the “terrorist” label, which is failure to take full account of the moral and legal significance of other forms of political violence that harm innocent people. I have used the term “terrorism” throughout this article to conform with the official, legally prescribed U.S. definition as used by the State Department, which refers to “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Hamas is a subnational organization, not a state, and its firing of rockets at Israeli cities can be defined as terrorism. Because the far greater civilian casualties among Palestinians have been inflicted by overt use of military force by a state — Israel — the attacks causing those casualties do not meet this definition of terrorism. If Hamas had F-16s or other modern combat aircraft, it undoubtedly would use them rather than poorly guided rockets to strike back at Israel. It probably would aim at targets it describes as combatants while perhaps, like Israel, dismissing the resulting civilian casualties as unfortunate collateral damage. And if Hamas were the government of a recognized state, it could do all those things and still avoid having any such use of force be defined as terrorism. Hamas is not a state and it doesn’t have F-16s. But those facts should not determine where moral opprobrium is to be applied when force results in innocent civilians getting killed and injured. Nor does it determine legal culpability with regard to war crimes, which can occur when civilians are harmed even if a military target is in the vicinity. Relevant asymmetries are to be found not in the lines drawn by definitions of terrorism, useful though they are for many other purposes, but rather in disproportionalities in the inflicted suffering and in the circumstances that have led to bloodshed in the first place.

U.S. House Votes to Repeal 2002 Iraq AUMF

by Dave DeCamp Posted On Thursday, the House voted to repeal the 2002 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that was used for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The bill passed in a vote of 268 to 161, with 49 Republicans voting in favor of the repeal and only one Democrat voting against it. The effort was led by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). “Repeal can prevent our country from entering another protected protracted engagement under this outdated authority,” Lee said on Thursday. “We can’t afford to leave this in place indefinitely. For two decades, it has been in place. This is our opportunity to restore our constitutional role.” Previous efforts to repeal the 2002 AUMF passed through the House but failed in the Senate. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) expressed support for repealing the 2002 AUMF and vowed to bring a vote on it to the floor of the Senate this year, a sign that the legislation has a good chance of making it to President Biden’s desk. On Monday, the White House said it supports repealing the war authorization since it will have little impact on current US military operations. “The administration supports the repeal of the 2002 AUMF, as the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis, and repeal of the 2002 AUMF would likely have minimal impact on current military operations,” the White House said in a statement. The 2002 AUMF was last cited by the Trump administration to justify the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. There was a renewed push in Congress to rein in the president’s war powers after Biden bombed Syria back in February. As the White House statement said, repealing the 2002 AUMF will not change much. The 2001 AUMF that was passed in the wake of the September 11th attacks is the one that is used to authorize current US wars in the Middle East.