There’s a bluebird sky over much of the U.S. this Easter Sunday, and our hearts turn to the people of Gaza– imprisoned in a strip that is a fraction of the size of most American counties and is yet again the target of Israeli missile strikes.
“Fear and anxiety quickly became the prevailing sentiment,” Tareq S. Hajjaj reports from Gaza. “Flashbacks from the two most recent wars on Gaza in 2021 and 2022 cross people’s minds.”
Those wars were largely massacres. Israel has found one way of dealing with Palestinian resistance to occupation: overwhelming force against civilians. And of course, the Biden administration is there to say Israel has a “right to defend” itself, as are Israel’s mouthpieces in Congress– though the good news is that Ritchie Torres now gets ratio’d on Twitter (“lol getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollar to simp for a foreign apartheid state is one of the easiest grifts in congress”).
The Biden administration did also express vague concern about the “scenes out of Jerusalem.”
That was the White House’s euphemism for Israeli forces beating Muslim worshipers inside the Al-Aqsa mosque for two nights in a row– images shared worldwide. The attacks were part of the messianic Israeli government’s commitment to assert a Jewish claim to the Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount, violating international law and agreements.
Some of those Jewish zealots carry goats, to slaughter them in a recreation of biblical mythologies. And the New York Times typically buries that provocation deep in a story that ascribes the violence to the actions of Muslims. Just as an Israeli philosopher and journalist had barely a word to say about Al Aqsa and Gaza in a long discussion of the crisis of Israel’s “democracy” on the New Yorker Radio Hour yesterday (which makes you wonder what philosophy and journalism are for).
Our job here is to continue to report on the extremes that Zionism is resorting to in the face of its growing delegitimization in an age of equality. Like the racist militia force that Netanyahu has assigned to his police minister so as to persecute Palestinians. Like Netanyahu accusing the Biden administration of secretly funding the demonstrators in the Tel Aviv streets in order to “topple” him. Like the “Ramadan commons” that Palestinians have formed to protect Jerusalem in the last five years.
And the roots of that extremism too. Today is the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre. 75 years– and still Jerusalem is not won for the Jewish state. What does that tell you?
