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Israeli occupation

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Jaffa and the sea, August 8, 2020 (Photo: Dareen Tatour)

A CBC Radio report covers Palestinians escaping the West Bank to visit the beach in Jaffa as a cheery coexistence story rather than a result of the Israeli occupation.

Izzeldin Bukhari is a chef based in Jerusalem’s Old City who works to promote traditional Palestinian food, but the Israeli occupation makes obtaining locally-grown produce very difficult. “[Israeli is] trying to teach us to give up on being Palestinian. And we are saying ‘I can’t’. Simply, we can’t. It’s in our blood, it’s in our ancestors, it’s the history, the heritage. It comes with every muskhan dish I eat, with every hiwerina I eat, with every waraka dawali. And this is how we continue to be Palestinian.”

Israeli security forces stand guard as settlers gather on “Mount Jumjumah” in the city of Halhul, north of the West Bank of Hebron on June 30, 2020. (Photo: Mosab Shawer/APA Images)

It has been one month since Israel’s unofficial July 1st deadline to annex the West Bank passed. According to data gathered by Mondoweiss from local Palestinian news reports, from July 1st to the 31st, there were at least 25 reported incidents of Israeli settlers attempting to seize Palestinian land, setting up new outposts, attacking Palestinians, vandalizing Palestinian homes, mosques, and vehicles, and burning down Palestinian crops and agricultural lands.

Suhail Khoury, director of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and his wife, Rania Elias, director of Jerusalem’s Yabous Cultural Centre, were taken by Israeli authorities from their home in the Beit Hanina area of occupied East Jerusalem on July 22 and held and interrrogated that day. Israel is “using brute force to extinguish cultural life,” says a former colleague of Khoury’s.

Biden defers to rightwing Israel lobby on Israel, blocking use of word “occupation” in the draft 2020 Democratic Party platform. He is clearly worried about losing Florida, and donors, to Trump. And you wonder why his Jewish outreach aide has endorsed a Republican over Ilhan Omar, or why Chuck Schumer paid no price for betraying Obama on the Iran deal.