We will not “return to a living death” of siege and blockade, say Gaza civil society leaders.
Ashraf AmraAPA images
As
academics, public figures and activists witnessing the intended
genocide of 1.8 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, we call
for a ceasefire with Israel only if conditioned on an end to the
blockade and the restoration of basic freedoms that have been denied to
the people for more than seven years.
Our foremost concerns are not only the health and safety of the
people in our communities, but also the quality of their lives – their
ability to live free of fear of imprisonment without due process, to
support their families through gainful employment, and to travel to
visit their relatives and further their education.
These are fundamental human aspirations that have been severely
limited for the Palestinian people for more than 47 years, but that have
been particularly deprived from residents of Gaza since 2007. We have
been pushed beyond the limits of what a normal person can be expected to
endure.
A living death
Charges in the media and by politicians of various stripes that
accuse Hamas of ordering Gaza residents to resist evacuation orders, and
thus use them as human shields, are untrue. With temporary shelters
full and the indiscriminate Israeli shelling, there is literally no
place that is safe in Gaza.
Likewise, Hamas represented the sentiment of the vast majority of
residents when it rejected the unilateral ceasefire proposed by Egypt
and Israel without consulting anyone in Gaza. We share the broadly held
public sentiment that it is unacceptable to merely return to the status quo
– in which Israel strictly limits travel in and out of the Gaza Strip,
controls the supplies that come in (including a ban on most construction
materials), and prohibits virtually all exports, thus crippling the
economy and triggering one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates
in the Arab world.
To do so would mean a return to a living death.
Unfortunately, past experience has shown that the Israeli government
repeatedly reneges on promises for further negotiations, as well as on
its commitments to reform.
Likewise, the international community has demonstrated no political
will to enforce these pledges. Therefore, we call for a ceasefire only
when negotiated conditions result in the following:
Freedom of movement of Palestinians in and out of the Gaza Strip.
Unlimited import and export of supplies and goods, including by land, sea and air.
Unrestricted use of the Gaza seaport.
Monitoring and enforcement of these agreements by a body appointed by the United Nations, with appropriate security measures.
Each of these expectations is taken for granted by most
countries, and it is time for the Palestinians of Gaza to be accorded
the human rights they deserve.
Signatures:
Akram Habeeb, Assistant Professor of American Literature, Islamic University of Gaza (IUG)
Mona El-Farra, Vice President and Health Chair of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society
Ramy Abdu PhD, Chairman of the Euro-mid Observer
Abdullah Alsaafin, Palestinian Writer/journalist
Ali Alnazli, Businessman
Adel Awadallah, Head of the Scientific Research Council
Hanine Hassan, Graduate Research Assistant
Sheren Awad, Journalist
Yahia Al-Sarraj, Associate Professor of Transportation, IUG
Tawfik Abu Shomar, Writer and political analyst
Hasan Owda, Businessman
Ibrahim AlYazji, Businessman
Walid Al Husari, Chair, Gaza Chamber of Commerce
Nael Almasri, Dentist
Wael El-Mabhouh, Political researcher
Rami Jundi, Political researcher
Ashraf Mashharawi, Filmmaker
Mohammad Alsawaf, Journalist
Hasan Abdo, Writer and political analyst
Kamal El Shaer, Political researcher
Omar Ferwana, Dean of Medicine Faculty, IUG
Iyad I. Al-Qarra, Journalist, Palestine newspaper
Musheir El-Farra, Palestinian activist and author
Khalil Namrouti, Associate Professor in Economics, IUG
Moein Rajab, Professor in Economics, Al-Azhar University - Gaza
Basil Nasser, Planning advisor
Hani Albasoos, Associate Professor in Political Science, IUG
Arafat Hilles, Assistant Professor, Al-Quds Open University
Imad Falouji, Head of Adam Center for Dialogue of Civilizations
Moin Naim, Writer and political analyst
Yousri Alghoul, Author
Mohammad Jayyab, Editor of Gaza Journal of Economics
Mousa Lubbad, Lecturer in Finance, Al-Aqsa University
Iskandar Nashwan, Assistant Professor in Accounting, Al-Aqsa University
Shadi AlBarqouni, Graduate Research Assistant
Adnan Abu Amer, Head of Political Department, Al-Umma University
Wael Al Sarraj, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, IUG
Said Namrouti, Lecturer in Human Resource Management, IUG
Khaled Al-Hallaq, Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering, IUG
Asad Asad, Vice Chancellor for Administrative Affairs, IUG
Hazem Alhusari, Lecturer in Finance, Al-Aqsa University
Shadi AlBarqouni, Graduate Research Assistant
Deya’a Kahlout, Journalist, Al-Araby newspaper
Raed Salha, Assistant Professor in Geography, IUG
Sameeh Alhadad, Businessman
Tarek M. Eslim, CEO, Altariq Systems and Projects
Sami Almalfouh PhD, Senior engineer
Fayed Abushammalah, Journalist
Fadel Naeim, Chairman of Palestine Physicians Syndicate
Zeyad Al-Sahhar, Associate Professor in Physics , Al-Aqsa University
Iyad Abu Hjayer, Director, Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution
Wael Al-Daya, Associate Professor in Finance, IUG
Younis Eljarou, Head of the Red Crescent Society for the Gaza Strip
Donia ElAmal Ismail, Head of the Creative Women Association
Zeinab Alghonemi, Head of Women for Legal Consulting Association
Palestinian Refugees Deserve to Return Home. Jews Should Understand.
Palestinians from Gaza leaving the occupied West Bank to go to Jordan in 1968.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Peter Beinart
Mr.
Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer who focuses on politics and
foreign policy, is an editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a
version of this essay appeared.
Why
has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East
Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears
to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the
American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.
The
Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than
700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during
Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have
occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced
when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians
whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem
evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of
expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.
Among
Palestinians, Nakba is a household word. But for Jews — even many
liberal Jews in Israel, America and around the world — the Nakba is hard
to discuss because it is inextricably bound up with Israel’s creation.
Without the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Zionist leaders
would have had neither the land nor the large Jewish majority necessary
to create a viable Jewish state. As I discuss at greater length
in an essay for Jewish Currents from which this guest essay is adapted,
acknowledging and beginning to remedy that expulsion — by allowing
Palestinian refugees to return — requires imagining a different kind of
country, where Palestinians are considered equal citizens, not a
demographic threat.
To avoid this
reckoning, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies insist
that Palestinian refugees abandon hope of returning to their homeland.
This demand is drenched in irony, because no people in human history
have clung as stubbornly to the dream of return as have Jews.
Establishment Jewish leaders denounce the fact that Palestinians pass
down their identity as refugees to their children and grandchildren. But
Jews have passed down our identity as refugees for 2,000 years. In our
holidays and liturgy we continually mourn ourexpulsion and express our yearning for return.“After being forcibly exiled from their land,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence,
“the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion.” If keeping
faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn
Palestinians for doing the same thing?
In
addition to telling Palestinians they cannot go home because they have
been away too long, Jewish leaders argue that return is impractical. But
this too is deeply ironic because, as a refugee rights advocate, Lubnah
Shomali, has pointed out,
“If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people and
settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.” At the height of
the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, Israel took in about 500,000 immigrants.
If millions of diaspora Jews began moving to Israel tomorrow, Jewish
leaders would not say taking them in was logistically impossible. They
would help Israel to do what it has done before: build large amounts of
housing fast.
When most Jews imagine
Palestinian refugees’ return, they probably don’t envision it looking
like Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they predict
Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. But the tragic reality is
that not many Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since it is
believed that only a few thousand remain intact. Ms. Shomali estimates
that more than 70 percent of Palestinian villages that were destroyed
in 1948 remain vacant. And the Palestinian activists and scholars who
envision return generally argue that large-scale eviction is neither
necessary, nor desirable. Asked in 2000 about Jews living in formerly
Palestinian homes, the famed Palestinian literary critic Edward Said
declared that he was “averse to the notion of people leaving their
homes” and that “some humane and moderate solution should be found where
the claims of the present and the claims of the past are addressed.”
None
of this means refugee return would be simple or uncontested. Efforts at
historical justice rarely are. But there is a reason the writer
Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations
for segregation and slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that
forced many Black Americans into foreclosure in the first decade of the
21st century. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not
remain in the past. That’s also the lesson of the evictions that have
set Israel-Palestine aflame. More than seven decades ago, Palestinians
were expelled to create a Jewish state. Now they are being expelled to
make Jerusalem a Jewish city. By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the
Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensure that the Nakba
continues.
Perhaps American Jewish
leaders fear that facing the crimes committed at Israel’s birth will
leave Jews vulnerable. Once the Nakba taboo is lifted, Palestinians will
feel emboldened to seek revenge. But more often than not, honestly
confronting the past has the opposite effect.
After
George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor, wrote about the
house in Jerusalem that his grandfather had built and been robbed of, a
former Israeli soldier who had lived in it contacted him unexpectedly.
“I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in
it and I cannot deny it,” the former soldier said when they met, and
then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” Mr. Bisharat later wrote that he was inspired to match the Israeli’s humanity.
“Just
that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring
itself to apologize to the Palestinians,” he wrote. In that moment he
saw “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that
could transform the relations between the two peoples.”
There
is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former soldier: “teshuvah.”
It is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however,
its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not
be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. That means the
return of Palestinian refugees — far from necessitating Jewish exile —
could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of
memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish
life.
“The occupier and myself — both
of us suffer from exile,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once
declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The
longer Jews deny the Nakba, the deeper our moral exile becomes. By
facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and
Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart)
is professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School
of Journalism at the City University of New York. He writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter, and is editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.
____ Copied and Pasted from New York Times as per above
utilisizng the creative commons share and share alike
Yesterday morning (Tuesday) we woke up with the news of twenty one
Palestinians killed in Gaza, nine of them minors, and two Israeli women
killed in Ashkelon (one of them; it later turned out, was a migrant
worker from India, and since then, the death toll on both sides more
than doubled). Then came the email which I was expecting. Noa Levy of
Hadash sent out an urgent call for emergency protests in Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem, A second message, from the Forum of Israeli and Palestinian
Bereaved Families and Combatants for Peace, endorsed the Hadash call and
added a Haifa protest venue initiated by the Haifa Women for Women
Center. “The government is playing with fire - all of us get burned! In a
desperate attempt to cling to power, Netanyahu is dragging us into
war, into killing and suffering and pain for both peoples. Stop the
escalation! Cease the fire! Stop the expulsion of families from Sheikh
Jarrah, stop the police rampage in East Jerusalem. There can be no peace
and no quiet as long as the West Bank lives under occupation and Gaza
suffers a suffocating siege. The solution: an end to the occupation, an
end to the siege of Gaza, and the establishment of a Palestinian state
alongside Israel, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We all deserve to
live in freedom and security. The time to act is now!”
And so, there were several hours of frantic work at the computer and
phone, spreading the message by Facebook and Whatsapp to all who
waited for such a call on such a day. And then taking the bus to Tel
Aviv. The Kugel Boulevard, main Holon thoroughfare on which all buses to
Tel Aviv travel, had its completely normal daily bustle. On King George
Street in Tel Aviv there were already several hundred people gathered
outside the Likud Party headquarters. Among them familiar faces, the
determined minority of Israelis who always show up on such days, as in
2014 and 2009.. “Stop the fire, stop the bloodshed!” chanted several
hundred throats. And “On both sides of the border / Children want to
live!” and “Sheikh Jarrah, don’t despair / We will end the occupation
yet!” and also “Gaza, Gaza, don’t despair / We will end the siege yet!”
and “Netanyahu, Netanyahu / The Dock at the Hague waits for you!”.
Dispersal, and a vague feeling of frustration. But what more could we
have done? Perhaps we would have felt more satisfied to be violently
dispersed and spend the night in detention - but here, unlike other
locations, the police did not interfere with the demonstration. There
were only two bored police officers watching from the side. Our favorite
vegan eatery was nearby, so we went in. Everything was just like any
other evening out in downtown Tel Aviv, it felt a bit strange to have
life as usual while terrible things happen elsewhere.
The air raid alarms wailed just after we paid our bill and started
walking. We went into a nearby big pharmacy. The pharmacy staff were
quietly efficient – “Over here, turn left, the basement stairs are
there”. About a hundred people – staff and clients and everyone who
happened to be on the street – crowded in. Even in the basement, we
could clearly hear the explosions in the sky. “Are these the missiles
themselves, or the interceptors?” wondered an old woman. Another old
woman said “Don’t worry, dear, if this goes on we will all learn to know
which is which”.
After a quarter of an hour we thought it was over and everybody
emerged and started again down the street – and then the air raid siren
sounded again. This time we went into the basement of a private house
with very friendly young people who offered to let us stay the night.
“You can stay here, no need to risk going out again, we have spare
beds”.
I must say that up to that point it still felt like a bit of a game. I
realize now that we shared the arrogant illusion of most Israelis that
the Iron Dome missiles were giving us virtually complete protection. But
as we were huddling in the second basement of the evening, the phone
rang: “Are you OK? Good to hear your voice, I heard of the burned bus in
Holon, I was so worried!” “I am in Tel Aviv, what bus is that?” A quick
look at the news websites showed the Kugel Boulevard where we had
passed just three hours before. It was a war zone, flames and scattered
debris everywhere, and the skeleton of a completely burned bus in the
middle. It was reported that the driver heard the alarm, stopped the
bus and told everybody to run just a minute before the bus was hit.
Perhaps we should have taken the young people’s offer and stayed the
night with them. Getting back home was a long and weary experience. The
main roads were blocked by the police, and we saw ambulances and fire
trucks rushing forward. The bus from Tel Aviv let us off a long way from
home and there were no taxis to be had in the whole of Holon, so there
was a very long and weary trudging through dark empty streets.
At home I had a whatsapp exchange with an old friend. “Stay alert,
this night is not yet over” she wrote. “The government is sure to order a
strong retaliation for this attack on Tel Aviv, and the Palestinians
will want to retaliate for the retaliation”. She was completely right.
After 3.00 PM there was a very long series of alarms, one after the
other. The explosions were more vague and seemed a long distance off.
This time they were aiming at the Ben Gurion Airport.
One of the missiles had fallen on a hut in Lod (Lydda), and killed a
fifty year old man and his teen daughter. It later turned out that they
were Arabs, that they had lived in an “unrecognized” neighborhood where
no building permits are issued, and that this prevented them from
building a more solid structure which could have saved their lives.
And so here we are, with the conflict escalating and the death toll
rising ever more steeply. And I should recapitulate, at least briefly,
how we got to this.
Last Friday – just five days ago, though it seems like an eternity –
public attention in Israel was totally riveted to the complicated dance
of party politics. Prime Minister Netanyahu, facing three serious
corruption charges at the Jerusalem District Court, had just failed in
his efforts to form a new cabinet. The mandate passed to the
oppositional “Block of Change”, whose leaders embarked on delicate
negotiations aimed at forming a very heterogeneous government coalition
comprising right-wing. left-wing and center parties, which have
virtually nothing in common except the wish to see the last of
Netanyahu. We had very mixed feelings about it, especially since the
intended new Prime Minister Naftali Bennet is, if anything, more
right-wing than Netanyahu. Still, the new government would have very
strong mechanisms of “mutual veto” in place that would prevent Bennet
from doing too much harm – though the same would also prevent the new
government from doing much good, either. And this government would be
the very first in Israeli history to rely on an Arab party for its
parliamentary majority (other than the Rabin Government in 1995, whose
tenure was cut short by the PM being assassinated).
Anyway, there were very concrete plans to have the new cabinet ready
for parliamentary approval by Tuesday, May 11 (yesterday). The
anti-corruption demonstrators who have been demonstrating every week
outside the Prime Minister’s residence were joking about when the movers
will arrive to take away the Netanyahu family furniture. But Netanyahu
had other irons in the fire.
First, there was the planned expulsion of hundreds of Palestinians
from their homes in the Sheikh Jarach neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
Dozens of them were due to be expelled within days and extreme right
settlers were going to enter into their vacated homes. Protests in
Sheikh Jarach and elsewhere in East Jerusalem met brutal police
repression. Then, protests spread to the Haram A Sharif (Temple Mount)
compound, and so did the police repression. Police started to shoot
“rubber” bullets directly into demonstrators’ faces, causing them to
lose eyes – at least two of them losing both eyes and becoming blind for
the rest of their lives. Footage of the police breaking into the
Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site and a place considered even
by secular Palestinians as a major part of their national heritage,
spread widely through the social networks, escalating the protests. And
then there was the plan to have thousands of radical young settlers hold
the provocative “Dance of the Flags” right through the Damascus Gate
and the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, chanting their
habitual racist slogans. The police and government reiterated hour after
hour that the “Dance of the Flags” would take place as scheduled. And
it was then that Hamas in Gaza threatened to retaliate for the attack on
the Palestinians of Jerusalem, and the government declared that it
would not bend to “the ultimatums of terrorists”. And at the very last
moment the “Dance” was cancelled – but it was too late. At 6.00 PM the
salvo of seven Hamas rockets at the outskirts of Jerusalem – which in
fact caused no casualties or damage, but which precipitated the Israeli
deadly retaliation on Gaza. .
And now, a bit more than 48 hours later, here we are, in the midst of
an escalating war, the Israeli Air Force destroying high rise buildings
in Gaza and proudly announcing the “elimination” of senior Hamas
activists – but unable to hinder the Palestinians’ ability to go on
shooting rockets. And relations between Jews and Arabs, fellow citizens
of Israel, have descended to unprecedented depths of inter-communal
violence. In Lod, the police declared a night curfew “to stop the
rampaging Arabs” but Arab inhabitants refuse to abide and are involved
in violent confrontations with police around a local mosque. And in Bat
Yam and Tiberias, mobs of extreme right Jews are assaulting random Arabs
and smashing up Arab-owned shops. And repeated again and again in the
media is the government's total refusal to make a ceasefire. “No, no, no
ceasefire – we must teach Hamas a lesson!”
Of course no ceasefire. Why should Netanyahu want a ceasefire? Every
day in which the shooting continues is one more day of keeping that
dreaded movers’ truck away from the Prime Minister’s Residence, one more
day of keeping power in his own hands. If there was concrete proof that
Netanyahu did it all consciously and deliberately, it would make up
criminal charges far more serious than those he is facing at the
District Court of Jerusalem. But any such evidence is probably
classified Top Secret and would only be published fifty years from now.
So, we can’t prove that he did it deliberately, though there can be
little doubt about it. We can only end the war and immediately
afterwards get rid of him.
Perhaps what is happening now will shake President Biden out of the attitude of keeping a low profile on |Israel and the Palestinians? (not a chance Mr Keller) After all, all this mess had fallen on his desk with quite a loud clatter…
' Israel must be really afraid us' as the Palestinians told Jean Genet, in 1971 and later in 82.... and yes it continues to be afraid of this small people...
Israel is so afraid of the weakened, and segmented fragmented Palestinian people they bomb, gas, attack, shoot, maim, cripple, them whenever they are able to, which is most of the time Israel Goliath
with its air force that kills day and night
with its navy crushing the fishermen ofGaza
with its fanatics and settlers beating up children, men, women on the West Bank, in Jerusalem El Kuds,
with its tanks and bombs and guns,
but really Israel is terribly afraid and cowardly,
because Israel is, like the rest of the world, knows and pretends to hide,
nothing without all the bombs, guns and cruise missiles and the fancy murderous jets
and the atomic bombs,
it's nothing without all that shit
made to kill,
they would lose in real combat,
the women alone and by themselves would tear to pieces the whole of the so called Israel army
and their gangsters spies and thugs, their non intelligent unkind murderous agents of death
yet today the United States and Russia and China stand by as
the Israel army and air force
kills,
without a flicker of conscience, kills
will children, by the dozen,
or the hundred, or thousand , if needed,
and does Peace Now enter the streets to demonstrate? Not at all, because everyone just wants the Palos, to just disappear,
to go away,
gone in the smoke of a gun, a bomb, a death,
phosophorous bombs and the good old United States
led by their Democratic President Joe Biden, who's biding his time...
On
Monday, we spoke to writer and poet Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family is
facing forceful eviction from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of
Jerusalem. He also spoke on CNN and MSNBC.
After these interviews, Israeli forces arrested him and forcibly
removed him from Sheikh Jarrah. It was captured in a dramatic video
shared widely on social media. “They just threw me in the street and
told me that I couldn’t come back into the neighborhood,” El-Kurd says.
“They’ve done this many times to us, many of my family members, many of
my neighbors. They do this routinely.” El-Kurd has been one of the most
prominent Palestinian voices in recent weeks describing what is
happening in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where Israeli
authorities’ planned evictions of several Palestinian families to give
their homes to Jewish settlers has been widely described as “ethnic
cleansing.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
On Monday, we spoke
to Mohammed El-Kurd, whose family is facing forceful eviction from the
Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. He then spoke on CNN and MSNBC.
After these interviews, Israeli forces arrested him and forcibly
removed Mohammed from Sheikh Jarrah. It was captured in a dramatic video
shared widely on social media.
For more, we go to Jerusalem to speak with Mohammed El-Kurd, writer
and poet in occupied Palestine, who is organizing to save his family’s
home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Mohammed, we spoke to you Monday. Describe what happened next.
MOHAMMED EL-KURD: Hi, Amy. Good to be back.
Yeah, I was standing in my neighborhood at night, and Israeli forces,
while they were dispersing, violently dispersing, and suppressing the
protesters and assaulting them and beating them, landed on me. And
although they know that I live in the neighborhood, although they know
my face, they forcibly took me out of the neighborhood. I would want to
mention also that this has happened to me before, on the same day, in
the morning, but there was no cameras to capture it.
I am unsure if this was targeted or not, or if this is because of
what I said on national television. What I do know is that Palestinians
are targeted constantly by Israeli violence, be they outspoken or not.
So, for my Palestinian siblings, our silence will not protect us. We
should all be speaking out against Israeli atrocities and [inaudible] —
AMYGOODMAN:
But where were they taking you? They were taking you out of your home. I
mean, there’s this other viral video of your twin sister who is telling
a Jewish settler to leave your home. Where were these Israeli soldiers
that we are showing now taking you?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD:
They just threw me in the street and told me that I couldn’t come back
into the neighborhood. And they’ve done this many times to us, many of
my family members, many of my neighbors. They do this routinely.
NERMEENSHAIKH: And could you talk also, Mohammed, about the reports of quite blatant collusion between settlers and Israeli security forces?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD:
Thank God for social media, because not only in Sheikh Jarrah, in
Haifa, in Lod, in Jaffa, in the Gaza Strip, we are seeing the Israeli
settlers emboldened by the Israeli state. And there are many videos that
have surfaced of Israeli police officers assaulting Palestinians, and
doing it with brute force, and doing it with aggression, doing it like
they have a personal vendetta against them, which they do. It’s nothing
short of terrorism. But again, like I said, thank God for social media,
because it appears to me that the world is finally waking up to the fact
that Israel is an apartheid state and it treats Palestinians with such
dehumanization. It treats Palestinians the way colonizers treat the
colonized.
NERMEENSHAIKH:
And also, as you point out, the role of social media, as a result, the
whole world knows what’s going on. And there have been protests held in
many cities around the world. What is the significance of solidarity
from activists and others in these different cities, including many in
Europe, as well as some in the U.S.?
MOHAMMED EL-KURD:
Absolutely. I think those protests, that are in hundreds of cities,
actually, are also spearheaded by Palestinians in the diaspora, much
like the protests that are happening all across historic Palestine.
The first significance of these protests is that they’ve indicated to
us that these colonial fragmentations that Israel has worked
tirelessly, explicitly and implicitly, to implement within Palestinians,
these tactics of intimidation, are not working, that we are all the
Palestinian people, regardless of geography and regardless of, you know,
legal status. We are all the Palestinian people, and we are rising up
against this.
I also think grassroots people on the ground all over the world are
realizing that they have the tools to end Israeli aggression towards
Palestinians, to end the Israeli occupation once and for all, to end
Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
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Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of
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Israel did 50 air strikes in just 15 minutes. Gaza is BURNING and there’s nothing they can do. please give this international attention.
#GazaUnderAttack#PalestineWillBeFree
#GazaUnderAttack
People of Gaza are saying: We lived 3 wars in Gaza! But the last hour is more difficult than all of them! This is insanity, genocide and terror
Israel used f-35 warplanes which i think it's the first time they used them because the sound was unbelievable and I don't think I ever heard it before #GazaUnderAttack
The occupation of Israel air force uses internationally prohibited weapons, bombing Palestinian civilians with phosphorous !!
you can hear the children voice !
#FreePalestine
Israel is using white phosphorus shells which are internationally banned weapons. They used it against Gaza before back in 2008 and now here they are doing it again.
SPREAD THE NEWS THEY ARE W*AR CRI*MINALS .
#IsraeliTerrorism#GazaUnderAttack
israeli army fired phosphorus bombs on gaza strip. if you don't know, white phosphorus is internationally banned because it burns flesh to the bone and causes deformities/cancer. please help amplify the quoted thread to reach people in need #GazaUnderAttack
Quote Tweet
muslim army struggles⁷
@bangtanmuslim
·
how to deal with white phosphorus:
-extinguish a burning piece of phosphorus with sand
-put a wet cloth on the nose and breath through it
-remove any piece of phosphorus stuck to the body immediately
-it's necessary to prevent oxygen from reaching the burning phosphorus++
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Views expressed here are my own, it doesn't represent my country or any organization I work with.
Omar.journalist@gmail.com
http://linkedin.com/in/omarghraieb
To those who tell us to "stay safe": I truly appreciate your support but:
1- #Gaza has no shelters.
2- I'm staying at home, what else can I do to stay safe?
3- Gaza is a highly populated condenced little space.
4- Most of us are unarmed.
What else can we do?
#GazaUnderAttack
I’m calling on all the world leaders including on the Prime Minister of the country that has been my home for the past 4 years to do everything in their power to make sure the violence and killing of innocent people stops immediately. Enough is enough.
Jews fleeing the city of Lod, as the Mayor call it a "Mini civil Warin" & while muslims & jews clash around the city.
Muslim freedom fighters have overrun many police stations and have captured Israeli weapons...
#AlAqsa
WATCH: A state of emergency has been declared in the Lod as fighting between Israelis and Palestinians grips the city a day after a Palestinian protester was killed by an Israeli settler.
Lod Mayor has begged the army to intervene saying the city had descended into 'civil war'.
Jewish Israelis inLod stated how their Arab neighbors, are encouraging the prostesterss to attack cars owned by other settlers .
I just understood what Nasrallah meant when he said that 1948 Palestinians are at the heart of this fight.
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Liz Cheney: "We face a threat America has never seen before: A former president who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him."
Israeli warplanes are repeatedly targeting al-Johara building (4 missiles) in Gaza City, which houses lots of media orgs.
Al Jazeera office, located in adjacent building, suffered damages
Earlier, Israeli drones fired “warning taps” (basically missiles) targeting the building
Truly incredible to hear Mitch McConnell accuse Democrats of rigging the rules with HR1 when he stole 2 Supreme Court seats for Trump, blocked 110 Obama judicial nominees & prevented a vote on restoring Voting Rights Act for 7 years
Edward Said once wrote, "The history of the Jews has shown that time only increases attachment to the historically saturated land of Palestine." We didn't give up on return. We can't ask Palestinians to either https://jewishcurrents.org/teshuvah-a-jewish-case-for-palestinian-refugee-return/
I very much hope that your family is safe, Amb. Friedman. But you are one of those irresponsible right-wing extremists.
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David M Friedman
@DavidM_Friedman
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You are not on the ground, I am. You don’t have family in shelters, I do. You are only processing facts that fit within your pre-conceived narrative. If you cared to learn the truth, you would understand how far Israel goes to mitigate the risks of violent escalation. twitter.com/sensanders/sta…
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