Palestinians disconnected from each other have struggled immensely to maintain a national project with clear objectives. Now, struggling together across the entire geography of historic Palestine, the disintegrated parts of our body are coming back together.
Our current living conditions under the siege are an affront to human dignity. Concrete political action is needed NOW to end not only the current deathly bombing raids, but also this illegal occupation and siege of Gaza by Israel, immediately.
Hundreds of Palestinians were injured and dozens were hospitalized on Friday night across the city of Jerusalem, as Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and continued to crackdown on protests against the imminent evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah. The violence that erupted on Friday was the culmination of weeks of rising tensions in the city and across the occupied Palestinian territory.
Last week, Palestinian officials took wide-ranging steps, declaring a month-long state of emergency, including closing schools and religious sites, and banning tourists. In the city of Bethlehem, the epicenter of the outbreak in the West Bank, Palestinian and Israeli officials began a lockdown on March 5, preventing entry and exit.
Israeli forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound bombs into crowds of Palestinian worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque as they celebrated the first day of the Eid al-Adha holiday.
It is quite typical for Israeli politicians to carry out confrontational measures against Palestinians shortly before general elections are due. Ramzy Baroud argues Netanyahu’s closure of a gate that leads to Al-Aqsa mosque was a move to appease extremists at the expense of Palestinians.
“Their ultimate goal is no conspiracy theory,” reports Mersiha Gadzo on the growing movement to destroy the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, in order to build a Third Temple: “One of the leading Temple movement organizations is the Temple Institute, which has had a blueprint ready for the temple’s construction since 2011. In 2014 they crowdfunded over $100,000 on Indiegogo to prepare architectural plans for their Third Temple.”
Palestinian violence outside Al-Aqsa mosque justifies the Israeli restrictions on the site, in the eyes of Israelis. But Al Aqsa is a Muslim compound, and the greater paradigm is that of Israeli state criminality and occupation, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi quarter in 1967.
It is nearly unheard of for Israeli police to block Jewish worshipers from reaching the Western Wall. But yesterday afternoon border authorities cinched back a hard plastic retracting wall of a Jerusalem checkpoint to reach the holy structures and for the first time in 14 years they also closed all access to al-Aqsa Mosque compound, preventing prayer in a campaign to stifle unrest smothering Jerusalem.
A radical Jewish fundamentalist who has pushed Jewish access to the Islamic sites in the Old City was shot in Jerusalem yesterday and Israeli police swiftly killed a Palestinian accused of the crime, and the Noble Sanctuary was closed for the first time since 1967