What’s beyond question, however, is that the news of Abu Rahmah’s death has highlighted a new alliance emerging between a small number of Israeli leftists and Palestinians engaged in unarmed mass protest action. Scores of Israeli activists had actually joined Friday’s demonstration, and they challenged the IDF claim that tear gas was fired only after stones were thrown by protesters. The news that Abu Rahmah had died brought hundreds of Israeli Jews to a protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday night outside Israel’s Defense Ministry, where a handful were arrested…. The image of Israeli police arresting Jewish Israelis dissenting from policies that the state insists are essential for security undermines government p.r. efforts to portray foreign criticism as part of an anti-Semitic campaign to “delegitimize” Israel.
Daniel Argo on Democracy Now:
The wall, besides being an obstacle for normal life in Palestine, it also serves in many ways as a separation between—trying to hide Palestinians as far away as the Israeli government can. And I think these weekly demonstrations in Bil’in and in other villages and in East Jerusalem, ones that combined Palestinian, Israeli and international activists, is the strongest political statement that we can make. And this is a statement that takes apart all the fears and all the panic that the Israeli government is trying to put on every day. And the most simple act of Israelis and Palestinians demonstrating together, meeting together, on a weekly and many times on a daily basis, this is something that shows that even politics in the Middle East are possible. This is, for me, the very important thing.
