Palestine Update 626
_Comment_
Israel’s right wing adopts suppression. Palestinians are defiant.
In a recent commentary from Washington Post, there is description and analysis on the flood of illegal arms into Palestinian communities,
including East Jerusalem, where local arms traffickers say “business
has never been better”. This is also true of circumstances in Palestinian Israeli towns, where “a political and security vacuum has allowed criminal gangs to flourish, and spurred ordinary people to buy guns for their own protection”. Many black-market weapons are smuggled from neighboring countries; others are pieced together in makeshift factories or stolen from Israeli military armories.
Israel’s new hard-right government has pledged to retaliate with
permits of new gun permits to Israeli civilians on the poorly
constructed argument that “more guns in the hands of more trained
Israelis will save lives, empowering citizens to act as a first line of
defense”. The path to acute violence has opened up. The only way out
of this dangerous impasse is for the international community to compel talks that will dismantle Israel’s racist-colonialist-apartheid system that are mediated in a platform with reliable mediators not just from the Western blocs.
There is criticism of the dominant approach that too much of the efforts to dismantle Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial systems of
domination over the Palestinian people are following a purely legal
approach. Scholars, activists and even policymakers are too invested in
the path towards Palestinian liberation through securing a legal opinion
officially defining Israel’s violent expulsion of Palestinians as apartheid and colonialism. Political activists and analysts argue that it is not useful to confine all efforts towards Palestinian liberation within the frames of human rights and international law. To them, the core of the Palestinian struggle has never been and will never be a legal one. It is a struggle of and for justice, not law. These analysts are asserting that there is a difference between opting for the legal route and neglecting the path of justice.
The resentment is growing in the human rights community too. 12 leading Israeli human rights organizations have expressed “grave concern” regarding the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles’ remarks insinuating that Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of practicing apartheid against Palestinians as motivated by antisemitism. The letter also condemns “the escalating instrumentalization of allegations of antisemitism to prevent an open
debate about Israel’s oppressive policies towards Palestinians.”
On behalf of MLN Palestine Updates
Ranjan Solomon
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Israel-Palestine: CIA chief warns current tensions resemble Second
Intifada
“The CIA director has warned it will be a big challenge to prevent
“explosions of violence” between Israelis [1] and Palestinians [2]
amid tensions that bear a “resemblance” to the Second Intifada [3].
William Burns made his remarks after returning from a trip to Israel and the occupied [4] West Bank last week, where he held talks with leaders on both sides that left him “concerned”. “I was a senior US
diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned
– as are my colleagues in the intelligence community – that a lot of
what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of
those realities that we saw then too,” Burns said during an interview
[5] at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Washington on
Thursday. He added that the CIA is working with Israeli and Palestinian security services to prevent “explosions of violence” but admitted that it’s “going to be a big challenge”…Israeli forces have
killed 42 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem this year so far, continuing a trend of growing lethal policy since last
year…In 2022, at least 220 people [6] died in Israeli attacks across
the occupied territories, including 48 children. At least 167 were from
the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Palestinians killed 30
Israelis, including one child, the highest death toll since 2008.”
Read more from Middle East Eye [7] Why Security Cooperation with Israel Is a Lose-Lose for Abbas _West Bank coordination is vital to Mahmoud Abbas’s and the Palestinian Authority’s survival. It’s also hugely unpopular among
ordinary Palestinians._
“Security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and
Israel, which Abbas has described as a “sacred [8]” responsibility,
has been a central pillar of the Oslo process since 1993. Moreover, it
is vital to the survival of the PA itself—and, from Israel’s standpoint, the PA’s raison d’être. Thus, despite Abbas’s repeated threats to cut security ties with Israel over the years, he has only ever done so once before—amid fears of imminent Israeli annexations [9] in the West Bank following the release of the Trump administration’s peace plan in 2020—but quickly resumed cooperation following the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president. At the same time, however, PA-Israel security coordination remains hugely unpopular among ordinary Palestinians of all political stripes, who see it as a form of collaboration with the occupation and, for some, outright “treason [10],” and it has been a key sticking point in the PA’s on-again-off-again reconciliation process with Hamas. Moreover, maintaining security cooperation with the Israeli army while Palestinians are being killed in large numbers would be political suicide. This dilemma highlights one of the central failings of the Oslo peace process over the past three decades: Whereas the primary role of PA-Israel security cooperation is to prevent attacks on Israelis, whether soldiers or civilians, there are no provisions or mechanisms in place to protect the lives and property of Palestinians, as a population living under military occupation since June 1967, from Israeli incursions, shootings, arrests, land confiscations, and evictions—all of which continue more or less unabated—or from the daily specter of Israeli settler terror attacks [11].”
Source: [12]
Palestinian youth killed are all presumed guilty by Israel
_Israeli forces have already killed 41 Palestinians this year. Many of
them were children whose families are unlikely to receive any justice
writes Yara M. Asi_ “Young Palestinian men like Abdullah and Wasim, who make up the vast majority of the Palestinians killed in 2022 and thus far in 2023, are highly unlikely to receive an investigation into those responsible. They will probably be classified as dangerous militants regardless of evidence that suggests otherwise. Any political affiliation they may have had or any words denouncing Israel that they may have posted online will all be used to justify their deaths, devoid of any context of the reality of their lives. No evidence of actual crimes is likely to be provided; no apology will be given. This trend—the classification of all young men as militants—is a tactic adopted by other states also. Famously, the US drone program in the early 2010s only reported a few civilian casualties initially because all men above the age of 16 in areas known to be inhabited by groups like Al Qaeda were considered [13] “military-age”. These victims were therefore regularly counted as combatants, allowing the US to maintain the façade of a just and effective counterterrorism strategy.”
Read more in New Arab [14]
The Gun Battle in the Quiet Town of Jericho Surprised Its Residents as
Well as the PA _A Palestinian Authority security source said the incident shows that Hamas is trying to run cells of armed militants in every sector of the West Bank. This, he added, requires the PA to do some introspection_ “The fact that a Hamas cell was operating near Jericho – as became clear Monday morning through an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and armed Palestinians in a nearby refugee camp – came as a surprise not just to the Israeli security services, but also to the Palestinian Authority’s leadership and security services. In Jericho, which is considered a tourism city, such clashes are rare [15], and there are no large-scale organizations of armed men as there are in
other West Bank cities, first and foremost Nablus and Jenin. Nor does
the city suffer from internal struggles between clans the way, say,
Hebron does. A PA security source said the incident shows that Hamas
[16] is trying to run cells of armed militants in every sector of the West Bank.”
Read more in Haaretz [17]
Israel breaks 20-year record for administrative detention of
Palestinians – analysis
“According to the NGO HaMoked, the IDF recently broke its record for administrative detentions of Palestinians, dating back around 20 years to the 2002-2003 era of the Second Intifada, when the number passed the 1,000 mark [18]. Even during the later years of the Second Intifada and during the “Knife Intifada” of 2015-2016, the number of
administrative detainees was more in the 700 range. In quieter years
over the last two decades, the numbers were usually down closer to
200-300 at a time.”
Read more in Jerusalem Post [19]
See also [20]
Israel steps up Jerusalem home demolitions as violence rises
“Fo”For many Palestinians, the gathering pace of home demolitions
is part of the new ultranationalist government’s [21] broader battle
for control of east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast
war and claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future
independent state. The battle is waged with building permits and
demolition orders — and it is one the Palestinians feel they cannot
win. Israel says it is simply enforcing building regulations.”…Last
month, Israel demolished 39 Palestinian homes, structures and businesses in east Jerusalem, displacing over 50 people, according to the United Nations. That was more than a quarter of the total number of demolitions in 2022. Ben-Gvir posted a photo on Twitter [22] of the bulldozers clawing at Matar’s home. “We will fight terrorism with all the means at our disposal,” he wrote, though Matar’s home had nothing to do with the Palestinian shooting attacks. Most Palestinian apartments in east Jerusalem were built without hard-to-get permits”.
Read more in Washington Post [23]
‘It’s our home! Why would we leave?’ How Palestinians in Masafer Yatta are resisting Israel’s expulsion attempts “Ali’s car stops at the hilltop, behind a line of Palestinian cars. To the right, the houses of the Israeli settlement of Karmael [24] can be seen meters away, behind a double fence of metal wire. Ahead, a patrol of Israeli soldiers questions passengers of each car, one by one, while one of the soldiers aims his rifle from behind a cement cube, towards the line of vehicles…”What the Israeli government pretends to ignore is that the people of Masafer Yatta are owners and property holders of their lands,” points out Ali, as he makes his way through a rocky hill overlooking a ploughed land. “For generations, the people here have cultivated these lands with barley for their livestock, alternating their living place between the villages and their grazing lands depending on the season,” he says. “It’s just their way of life. These lands are their homes and their livelihood,” he stresses.”
Read more in New Arab [25]
15 February 2023
Source: nakbaliberation.com