Some of Palestine’s allies seem more comfortable with Palestinians as victims of Israel’s colonial rule than agents of their own liberation. Palestinians need support when they fight, not only when they die.
Ever since October 7, Israeli prison authorities have unleashed a brutal campaign of repression against Palestinian prisoners, including severe beatings, humiliation, and the deprivation of food, health care, and basic amenities.
Dismissing resistance to colonialism as terrorism deprives Palestinians of the basic right of political organization, and portrays Palestinian action as violent nihilism.
Many details of what transpired on October 7 continue to be shrouded in mystery, including how the 1,400 Israelis who died were killed. A growing number of reports indicate the Israeli military was responsible for civilian and military deaths.
The largest Jewish denomination in the US, Reform Jewry, showcased a leader of the dispossession of Palestinian lands at its biennial last week: the head of the Jewish National Fund. So the Union for Reform Jewry has embraced the violence inherent in Zionism. Shouldn’t Jews debate this?
A professor visits two of her Palestinian students in Ramallah and together they sneak into Jerusalem for a joyride to Jaffa: “Our car never stopped but took a pause, then zoomed forth. Malak announced, ‘I would like to notify you that we’re in Jerusalem right now.’ The two of them suddenly yelled with sheer elation, ‘We made it! We’re going to Yaffa!’ I had seen Malak on celebratory highs before, having seen him accomplish truly amazing things as an undergrad. But I had never witnessed the degree of outpouring of elation I was seeing from him now. I knew what Yaffa meant to him, as he had written about it and spoken about it on more than one occasion. He loved the sea, and he loved Yaffa. It had been taken from him. It was his home, his family’s home. At 22 years old, he had only seen the sea from Yaffa a handful of times – he had never swum there.”
Hanna is a “17-year-old American girl” who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. Because her father is a U.S. citizen born in Morocco, and she was traveling with a notebook that had one page of Arabic writing in it, she was subjected to an interrogation and strip search when leaving Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.
Brandishing their typical black and yellow flags and Hebrew signs boasting “Kahane was Right” and “There is no co-existence with cancer,” hundreds of right-wing activists took to the streets of Jerusalem Thursday night in a growing phenomenon of public demonstrations led by the country’s leading fascist groups such as Lahava and La Familia. The march and the Israeli extremists willingness to resort to violence against their state’s security forces testify to the impact that incitement is having on Jewish youth throughout the country, and portends an ever-growing threat of entrenching the current spiral of bloodshed.
Prime Minister elect Benjamin Netanyahu recently issued an apology to “Israeli Arabs” for his outlandishly racist Election Day remarks that “Arabs voters are going to the polls en masse.” Netanyahu chose to render his apology to a crowd of elderly men rather than the 12 recently elected Palestinian Arabs from the Joint List that actually represent the majority of the country’s Arabic speaking population. His message? Palestinians seeking genuine representation and influence in the body politic are not welcome.
Furthering his ceaseless campaign to leave no Jewish victim of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy unexploited, Benjamin Netanyahu recently said “Israel is the only place you can proudly proclaim ‘I am a Jew.’” Scott Ratner writes, “Israel is actually the one place that any Jew with a social consciousness should feel more ashamed of his or her identity than any other country in the world. After all, in no other country besides Israel is Judaism the perennial justification for a decade’s long quest to suppress and uproot the culture and presence of millions of non-Jews.”