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settler-colonialism

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The past month has been nothing less than traumatic for the Palestinian people. 

The massacre in Jenin, ongoing invasions, arrests, home demolitions; 36 people have been killed, eight of them children. Adam Ayyad, 15, was aware that a Palestinian under Israeli apartheid is always a potential target. The handwritten will he carried in his pocket the day he was shot began with the following words: “There were a lot of things I wished I could do, but we live in a country where realizing your dreams is impossible.”

Palestinians are enduring the rise to power of one of the most brazenly racist and brutal governments in the Israeli state’s history. But, however grim the reality looks for Palestinians, this may also be the moment of change.

The kind of power that supports the Palestinians manifests slowly, but not gradually. It takes a long time to get to a tipping point, and before it does, nothing really changes. Apartheid goes on, settlers continue to rampage, Congress continues to flood Israel with money and the Palestinians with condescending criticism, Gaza continues to be a giant open-air prison. 

But fortunately for the Palestinians, the U.S. is not the key to Palestinian liberation. The Palestinian people are.

Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, along with a coalition of other leading Palestinian civil society organizations, has released a new landmark report on Israeli apartheid, titled ‘Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler Colonialism’.

The new report explores apartheid as a “structural element of furthering Zionist settler colonialism” – a framework previously overlooked by international and Israeli human rights organizations in their own reports on Israeli apartheid. 

Jaafar Ladadweh, 55 and Yousef Ali looking at the settlements across from Naalan, September 2022. (Photo: Mariam Barghouti/Mondoweiss)

The small town of Mazraa Qabaliya in the northern West Bank is fighting the Israeli military and armed settlers for control of a resource that is both revered and essential to their community — Naalan mountain. “We all take turns making sure there is electricity extended and that the lights on this mountain are on at all times, to make sure there is a sign of life here” Ahmad Obeid, tells Mondoweiss. “We must keep the light on here on the mountain at all times. Once it’s off, know that something is wrong, that there is an attack.”

'Ambassadors of freedom - Palestine' on a bottle used for smuggled sperm at Razan clinic, Ramallah. Photo credit: Izzeddin Araj

A new rule that forces visitors who fall in love with Palestinians to inform Israeli authorities shows that the right to intimacy serves as both a realm of domination as well as a form of resistance under Israeli settler-colonialism.

Masafer Yatta

In May 2022 the Israeli Supreme Court ruled to expel the Palestinians living in the South Hebron Hills of the occupied West Bank and hand their land over to the Israeli military. Meet the Palestinians fighting to stay in their homes and resist what rights groups are calling a war crime under international law.