Today is unfolding as a horrifying and tragic day in Palestine. The Israeli military has opened fire on Gaza protesters as the U.S. and Israeli governments prepare to mark the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
Early reports on Monday suggested that Gaza’s demonstrators were being massacred by the Israeli army. Amnesty International called the events a “horror show”. But for more than a month, Israel has been working to manage western perceptions of the protests – and its response – in ways designed to discredit the outpouring of anger from Palestinians.
On Friday, Jewish settlers set fire to a house belonging to the Dawabsheh family in the village of Duma near the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, according to eyewitness. In July of 2015, settlers torched the Dawabsheh family home in an attack that claimed the lives of Saad and Riham Dawabsheh and their 18-month-old baby Ali.
On Friday, Israeli snipers killed a Palestinian and wounded 170 protesters in Gaza in the final Friday protest before the culmination of the March of Return on Nakba Day, May 15th. “People here are tired of life and futile peace negotiations for 25 years with a state does not want peace and denies right of the other people to exist,” Etaf Wadi, 56, told Mondoweiss. “The United States has used 43 vetoes against the Palestinians, but we have the right to freedom, and the superpowers will not give it to us so that we will take our right by our own hands.”
“I’m glad it’s over”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, as Elor Azarya, the soldier-medic who shot the incapacitated Palestinian suspect Abdel Fatah Al Sharif, returned home from his prison term served for ‘manslaughter’, after merely 9 months. Azarya was greeted like a real hero when arriving home, with Israeli flags and signs saying “It’s so good to have you home, the soldier of us all,” and “Welcome home, Elor the hero.”
Hatim Kanaaneh reads two articles on the detention and denial of entry into Israel of Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke and is outraged by the lack of outrage from Israeli law professors.
Durham, North Carolina became the first city in the country to ban local police exchanges with Israel on April 16, when the city council unanimously passed a resolution opposing any international “military-style” training for police officers. The victory was the result of a two-year campaign by a coalition of 10 local organizations, as well as the deep legacy of intersectional and internationalist solidarity in the U.S. South.
Reja-e Busailah’s memoir ‘In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood,’ is an unheralded masterpiece of the Nakba. A burgeoning scholar at 18, Busailah was forced out of Lydda with his family in 1948. This book’s poignant portraits of friends destroyed and traumatized by the Zionist militias tops any Israeli’s account of the Nakba.
In the early morning on Thursday, Israeli soldiers stormed the Tamimi home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh and took 21-year-old Waed Tamimi, Ahed Tamimi’s brother. Waed is now being held at Israel’s Ofer detention center near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and the family has not been told the reasons for his arrest. As the soldiers left the Tamimi home an Israeli army commander turned to Waed and Ahed’s brother Mohammad and told him: “Next time I will come for you.”
Distorting the timeline of events is an longtime Israeli strategy to make its enemies look like the aggressors and pass itself off as the victim. Israel’s massive aerial attacks earlier today today on Iranians and Syrians — its most extensive cross-border strikes in decades — are carrying out this propaganda strategy to perfection, and even normally skeptical news outlets are being fooled.