Last week the 21-year-old Fathi Harb extinguished his life in an inferno of flames in central Gaza. He had no hope of finding work and could not afford a home for his young family. But self-immolation is more than suicide, it is protest. Jonathan Cook writes: “Harb understood only too well the West’s hypocrisy in denying Palestinians any right to meaningfully resist Israel’s campaign of destruction. The flames that engulfed him were intended also to consume us with guilt and shame. Can the West be shamed into action?”

Jonathan Cook: “For seven decades, the west has pampered Israel at every turn. The lack of any meaningful punishment for violating Palestinian rights led directly to Monday’s massacre.”

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.

Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.

It is has been a very bad week for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was caught lying.

How did a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who has never set foot in the open-air prison of Gaza find herself being dumped there by Israeli officials – alone, at night and without her parents being informed? Jonathan Cook says the terrifying ordeal – a child realising she had not been taken home but discarded in a place where she knew no one – reveals Israel’s casual indifference to the fate of the people they have ruled over for five decades.

Gaza is effectively an open-air prison, an extremely overcrowded one, with only a few hours of electricity a day and its groundwater polluted by seawater and sewage. After a decade of this horrifying experiment in human endurance, the Israeli army finally appears to be concerned about whether Gaza can cope much longer.

Ahed Tamimi and Nabi Saleh have shown that popular unarmed resistance – if it is to discomfort Israel and the world – cannot afford to be passive or polite. It must be fearless, antagonistic and disruptive. Most of all, it must hold up a mirror to the oppressor. Ahed has exposed the gun-wielding bully lurking in the soul of too many Israelis. That is a lesson worthy of Gandhi or Mandela.

The US policy change on Jerusalem has been a hammer blow to the three main pillars supporting the cause of Palestinian statehood: the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the Arab states. The burden now falls on them to accept the new reality, and assert a policy independent of the US. Some Palestinian leaders, like Hanan Ashrawi, already understand this. “Trump’s move is a new era,” she said last week. “There’s no going back.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regards American liberal Jews as a “lost cause.” They are assimilating socially and are wedded to a worldview that is incompatible with Israel’s future as the military superpower in the Middle East. So Israel should invest in cultivating stronger ties to Orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.