The Israeli military is threatening a ground invasion of Gaza as the territory is attacked from air and sea.
The violence in Sheikh Jarrah isn’t exceptional. It is Zionism distilled to its purest expression. Dispossessing Palestinians is Zionism’s primary function.
Palestinians in the village of Burin were just sitting down to end their daily Ramadan fast when they noticed smoke rising on the outskirts of the eastern part of the village. As the evening unfolded they were forced to watch as the night sky lit up their village with orange flames and clouds of smoke. By the time the settlers and soldiers retreated, and the residents were able to put out the fires, the damage had already been done. “That land was planted with hundreds of olive trees, many of them were more than 70 years old,” Walid Saeed, 70, a local farmer in Burin, tells Mondoweiss. “There is no way to describe how we feel in Burin after what happened. This land, these trees, they are our whole lives, our heart and soul. They mean everything to us.”
Recent racist anti-Palestinian riots in Jerusalem show that settler-colonial violence is fundamental to Israeli society.
Palestinians in Jerusalem are reeling from a night of racist, anti-Arab violence that left over a hundred Palestinians wounded and dozens detained, following an ultra-right wing Israeli demonstration in the city during which Jewish mobs chanted “death to Arabs.”
Recent videos show routine racism and violence directed against Palestinians with Israeli government support. Jewish settlers threaten to unleash dogs on Palestinians. Others spew hatred as soldiers protect them: “This is my land, King David walked around here two thousand years ago, herding his sheep. When you were where — in Saudi Arabia? Where Muhammad roamed…. Muhammad killed people. Raped. You’re a rapist people.”
A new field report from Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq released this week details the numerous human rights violations that occurred throughout Palestine, particularly in the occupied West Bank, during 2020 — violations that the group said were exacerbated by, and spurred on, by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
A short video taken by a family as they picnicked in the West Bank this month may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy.
Bilal Bawatneh, Azzam Amer, and Khaled Nofal are the latest Palestinian victims in a spate of settler violence that has rocked the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, with new accounts of settler attacks on Palestinian civilians being reported in Palestinian and Israeli media nearly every day.