Israeli forces are rounding up Palestinians en masse inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory as part of what Israeli police are calling “Operation Law & Order”, following two weeks of Palestinian uprisings over Israeli aggressions in Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza.
Over the past three decades, Israel’s main effort to “Judaize” the “mixed cities” inside Israel has been waged through a war of attrition. This has included moving religious settlers into Palestinian communities, as well as using tourism and archeological preservation to take over land. The coexistence model in Israel’s “mixed cities” was always an illusion, and one that the recent protests finally served to smash.
Yoav Haifawi reports on how the “Strike for Unity,” the general strike that was observed throughout historic Palestine on May 18, unfolded in Haifa. He says it was a defiant display of unity across all sectors of the Palestinian community, even as ongoing governmental repression intensifies.
Yoav Haifawi continues his reporting from the uprising in Haifa, where the resistance is drawing from all sectors of the Palestinian community, as the Israeli government brings in the Shin Bet to help smash the protests.
Israeli police joined fascist mobs in attacking Palestinian neighborhoods, but this didn’t stop Palestinians in Haifa from joining the uprising taking place across Palestine. “These are historic moments and the people of Haifa are rising like never before,” Yoav Haifawi writes. “They are part of a united Palestinian struggle against their oppressors.”
Following a night of racist attacks by far-right Israeli extremists, Palestinians living in Lydda (Lod) are calling for immediate international intervention to defend them before it is too late.
The Israeli military is threatening a ground invasion of Gaza as the territory is attacked from air and sea.
The recent violence in the city Lydd (Lod) and other Palestinian cities in Israel has been described by many as “civil war,” but this narrative is misleading. Rather, what we are witnessing is the Israeli settler state declaring a war on its colonized “citizens,” and Palestinians fighting for their liberation.
It is a fiction to argue that there is any “co-existence” or that there are “mixed cities” inside Israel. It is a reality of ghettos and apartheid: an ongoing colonial project of Jewish supremacy. The reality of settler-colonialism, of Judaizing Palestine, is present in Lydda, “inside Israel” as much as it is in Sheikh Jarrah, in the occupied territory.
Itaf Anabtawi says that she called the police to take her son Munir, 33, to the psychiatric hospital, where he was a patient, for urgent treatment. Police say Munir attacked them, and they killed him in self defense. “They didn’t have to shoot him the way they did,” Munir’s aunt, Siham, tells Mondoweiss. “It was an execution. They executed him.”