Jonathan Cook: “For seven decades, the west has pampered Israel at every turn. The lack of any meaningful punishment for violating Palestinian rights led directly to Monday’s massacre.”
Nikki Haley says U.S. embassy in Jerusalem “promoted” peace, blames Iran with Hamas back-up for deaths of Palestinian protesters. Meanwhile officials in the United Nations call for an investigation into Israel’s actions.
Palestinians in Gaza today began holding funerals for protesters killed by Israeli forces at yesterday’s Great March of Return near the buffer zone between Gaza and Israeli, which coincided with the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Overnight casualties increased to 61, with the youngest killed was identified as 8-month old Laila al-Ghandour who died of tear gas inhalation.
Hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets of Jerusalem in protest as American and Israeli officials celebrated the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. “In America, they have the statue of liberty and pride themselves on freedom, but then they come to Palestine and support the racism of the Israeli occupation,” local activist Mohammed Abu al-Hummus told Mondoweiss. “This move shows us that they do not understand the true meaning of democracy.”
Phil Weiss reports from Jerusalem on the protests as the U.S. opened its new embassy: “The demonstrations I just left near the new American embassy in Jerusalem were a dismal object lesson in Jewish sovereignty. The police beat up Palestinians merely for holding Palestinian flags and chanting that Palestine would be free. The police crumpled the flags, while women on an apartment balcony four floors up were spraying water on the Palestinian demonstrators.”
It took a visiting New York Times reporter from Cairo to finally tell some truths about Israel’s ongoing massacre of Palestinian demonstrators inside Gaza. Meanwhile, the paper’s Israel correspondents continue to distort and whitewash.
Today is unfolding as a horrifying and tragic day in Palestine. The Israeli military has opened fire on Gaza protesters as the U.S. and Israeli governments prepare to mark the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
Mahmoud Abbas’s former adviser Diana Buttu said his address to the U.N. Security Council would not achieve anything. It is “yet another iteration of speeches long ago, in which he once again implored the world to convene an international conference to address Palestinian rights.”
Palestinian activists shut down a meeting in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Tuesday between a delegation from the U.S. Consulate and Palestinian city officials, marking an escalation in the widening rift between Palestinians and the U.S. after Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. After interrupting the meeting with banners comparing Trump to Nazis and ISIS, and shouting “you are not welcome anymore!” the American officials abruptly walked out of a conference room at the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The logic of so-called unification of Jerusalem is one of increasing maximum mobility rights to Israeli Jews in the occupied Palestinian populated areas while providing minimum resident rights to Palestinians in turn. Jerusalem is a city that emblematizes partition as such. Divided, it divides. And the more it is said to be unified, the more divided it is. For the unification is not about unity but about militarized colonial control. A city that is colonized and occupied cannot be unified but by force.