Israel has bombed Gaza for a third day in a row and mobilized dozens of tanks, raising fears that the Israeli government could launch another invasion. The latest airstrikes came earlier this morning, after Hamas announced it had reached an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Israel. Tension has been escalating for days in Gaza. On Friday, Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinians taking part in the weekly Great March of Return protests. Sixty-two other Palestinians were injured. On Sunday, Israeli air raids struck parts of Gaza, including a refugee camp. Then, on Monday, militants inside Gaza launched a series of homemade rockets toward Israel. One of those rockets hit a house north of Tel Aviv, injuring seven members of a British-Israeli family. Israel blamed Hamas for the rocket attack and retaliated by launching heavy airstrikes in Gaza City targeting the office of Hamas’s political leader and the group’s military intelligence headquarters. Seven Palestinians were reportedly injured in the strikes.
This all occurred as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington Monday to meet with President Trump, who signed an order Monday officially recognizing Israel’s control of the Golan Heights in defiance of international law. Netanyahu had been scheduled to address AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, today, but cut his trip short short due to the situation in Gaza and flew home.
The tension in Gaza comes as Netanyahu faces an uphill battle ahead of the Israeli elections April 9th and as Hamas faces internal protests over recent tax increases and deteriorating living conditions.
Budour Hassan talking:
by recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, the United States has turned itself into a pariah state, blessing and glorifying the violation of human rights. It’s obviously significant that after decades of refusing to recognize sovereignty, Donald Trump has given this massive election boost to Netanyahu by recognizing the sovereignty of the Golan Heights.
And what’s missing, though, Amy, from the coverage of the whole saga of recognizing the Golan Heights is no one actually is talking about the people of the Golan Heights, what they want and what they seek. And the people of the—the Syrian people in the Golan Heights have reiterated, time and time again, that this, their land, is Syrian. It’s not a disputed land. It’s not a contested land. It’s a Syrian land. And they have done everything in their power in order to defy Israel’s attempts to Judaize their land.
Since 1967, and especially since the annexation in 1981, the people of the Golan have risen up several times against Israel’s annexation. In 1982, actually, in February 1982, they’ve waged a 5-month general strike and a civil disobedience campaign that would go on to inspire Palestinians during the First Intifada, stressing that they refuse to hold Israeli identification cards and that they refuse all attempts to erase their Syrian identity. Again, in 2018, last October, Israel tried to impose municipal elections in the Golan Heights as a gesture of its sovereignty over their territory. And again Syrians in the occupied Golan Heights took to the streets in mass in order to oppose the holding electoral municipal elections in their lands and saying—stressing that they are Syrian.
During these decades, only just 6 percent of the entire residents of the Golan Heights have applied for Israeli citizenship, meaning that the vast majority of people, the overwhelming majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights, recognize and identify themselves as Syrians—again, despite Israel’s imposition of a curriculum that tries to erase Syrian identity and replace it with an artificial Jewish identity. We’re talking about 27,000 people living—mainly Syrian—living in the occupied Golan Heights who have been systematically discriminated against in terms of resources, whose resources have been exploited. We’re also talking about 230,000 Syrians who have been displaced in 1967, more than a half-million Syrian refugees from the Golan Heights who continue to be denied their right of return. We’re talking about families that have been fragmented between the Golan Heights and Syria. And we’re also talking about Israel’s continued exploitation of this resource-rich area and continued attempts to control and monopolize tourism and to claim sovereignty over the territory.
And Trump’s move recognizing, and signing this executive order, gives blessing to these continued violations and erases an entire people off the map. One friend in the Golan Heights had told me that it’s bizarre that a person who probably has never heard of the Golan Heights before that, he gives himself the right, entitles himself, to acknowledge Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan. It’s neither Trump’s to recognize this sovereignty, and it’s neither Israel’s to take. And this is—we’ve seen this happen in Jerusalem last year, when [the United States] moved its embassy, and except for a few rhetoric and few condemnation here and there, nothing actually happened. No punitive measures have been taken against the U.S. move to move its embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. And if we only get rhetorics, the same will happen. And this is the danger. Obviously, people in the Golan will continue to resist and will continue to protest, as they’ve always done, but this is an extremely dangerous step. And this signals that the United States, again, doesn’t give any regard to human rights or to international law or to international humanitarian law.
Jehad Abusalim talking:
I think what’s been happening in the Golan Heights is inseparable from Israel’s broader policies of seizing Arab and Palestinian land and continuing to control these lands. And the Golan Heights, like the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, you know, is a territory that have been—that the people there, like my colleague Budour said, their voices have been rendered unheard and silent over the years.
I think President Trump’s decision adds to the legacy of his administration and says much about the place of the occupation of Arab and Palestinian lands in the larger conversation in the U.S. today. This is a legacy of a president who separated refugee children on the border. This is a president who has been talking about building walls and separating people. This is a legacy of an administration that has been trying to separate people and divide them on the basis of their race and religion and so on. So, by rushing to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, President Trump gave Netanyahu a present, as part of boosting him for the sake of the upcoming elections in Israel. But this moment says much, says a lot about where the U.S. stands today and how do we view Israel—the United States’ role in the region.
unfortunately, we’re living in a global moment where there is rise of right-wing populism. There has been a decline in the ability of the international community, through the traditional institutions that have emerged after World War II, to at least exercise the minimum. And the minimum here, you know, we’re talking about condemnation. We’re talking about denouncing such steps. Unfortunately, the international community has been watching for a long time. And the inability of the international community to hold Israel accountable and to challenge the United States’ negative role, not only when it comes to the Palestinian issue—the Palestinian issue and the occupation of the Golan Heights is part of a larger package of how the United States behaves in the Middle East and how it exercises its foreign policy and what considerations inform that policy.
I think it’s about time for us to think about, and for the international community to think about, taking serious steps to challenge this approach and to challenge the United States and Israel and to hold Israel accountable and to act beyond condemnation and issuing statements. For long, the international community has been issuing statements of condemnations, and now, you know, fewer countries are talking about what’s going on in the Middle East, in Palestine, in Syria and so on. And I think this is the result of years and years of postponing the big issues and only highlighting certain aspects of the narrative and of the problem as it fit what, you know, the discourse is in the West. I think it’s about time to go beyond these narratives and to challenge the negative role the U.S. has played and to hold Israel accountable.
what’s happening in Gaza and the rest of Palestine goes beyond the past three days. Israeli propaganda wants to show that Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip yesterday and in the past few days have happened as a response to Palestinian militants launching a rocket. I think limiting the discourse to talking about this incident limits our ability to understand how violence unfolds, not only in the Gaza Strip, but in all of Palestine.
The Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond are victims to years and years of legal and structural violence that have been inflicted on them. And this violence that Israel exercises, Palestinians experience on a daily basis. And, you know, we see the manifestations of this violence affecting Palestinian lives in the Gaza Strip—for example, the decade-long blockade that rendered the Gaza Strip unlivable; people living in Gaza with four hours to six hours of electricity a day; more than 90 percent of Gaza’s water has been undrinkable and polluted, and people don’t have access to clean water. We’re talking about a Gaza Strip with 2.2 million people, the majority of whom have never had the chance to travel and see the outside world.
But it goes beyond Gaza. In the West Bank, Israel builds more settlements and seizes Palestinian land. And Palestinians in the West Bank have been subject to Israeli violence. Inside Israel itself, you know, Palestinian citizens of Israel are victims to laws like the nation-state law that diminished any hope for them to enjoy any kind of self-determination, and made and affirmed that Israel is not a state for all of its citizens. Palestinians in the diaspora have been denied their right to return.
So, when we talk about violence, we’re talking about decades and decades of violence that have been inflicted on Palestinians. And, yes, in response to these years of violence, some Palestinians would resort to using some violent methods in response. But Israeli propaganda is trying to show that its actions are responses to some Palestinians resorting to violence, although it’s their right to defend themselves according to international law and with accordance with international law. But again, it’s important to remember that what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is part of that larger context of violence that Israel practices against the Palestinians. And it’s important for us to remember, and remember that in our narrative and in our discourse, because if we don’t do so, in the next few days or weeks, if Israel launches another 2014-like operation, thousands of Palestinians will lose their lives, and many will be rendered homeless and injured.
Budour Hassan talking:
I first will talk about Palestinian citizens of Israel and their position from the elections and how we see the election, because I’m a Palestinian who carries an Israeli citizenship. And I personally am going to boycott these elections, as I have always done, because I believe that participating in these elections is only going to grant Israel legitimacy and is only going to promote its image as some sort of a democratic haven, when it is anything but. And many Palestinians, after having voted for the Joint List in the previous elections and having tried that, they’ve also realized that this whole exercise of giving legitimacy to Israeli—to the sham Israeli democracy is futile, and they’re going also to boycott either from ideological reasons or from believing that this is just pointless.
What we are seeing in the Israeli elections, the two main opposing parties—if we can call that opposing—is, on the one hand, we have Netanyahu and his far-right allies, that have been talking about and practicing annexation and violating the rights of Palestinians, and doing basically what all Israeli governments have been doing, right and left, but doing it in a naked fashion, so as not to make it appear that they’re different, but, on the other hand, we have the so-called Blue and White movement, which represents itself as some sort of a moderate opposition to Netanyahu. But the leader of this movement, Benny Gantz, is a warmonger. Just today, after—in response to the recent escalation in Gaza, he has called for targeted assassination. So this is the person who represents himself as a moderate. Even when he talks about ending—or, when he talked about ending the occupation in part of the West Bank, he’s only talking about that to give Palestinians a sort of a sham state or sham control, not because he calls for liberating or because he wants an end to the occupation. So, right now, among all main Israeli parties, there is not a single Israeli, Zionist Israeli, party that is actually serious about ending the occupation, that’s serious about recognizing Palestinian rights. They’re all faces of the same coin, regardless of where they sit on the spectrum, regardless whether they represent themselves as liberal or as conservative. And this is precisely why many of us Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship are insistent that we won’t participate in the elections and we won’t contribute to this erasure of our rights, because also we believe that we have other avenues to resist Israeli violations of our rights, especially on the streets, by taking to the streets and by popular resistance, not by participating in the parliament.
Now, regarding the question of Netanyahu’s upcoming or possible indictment, of course, we all know that there is a decision by the Israeli attorney general to indict Netanyahu on one case of bribery charges and on breach-of-trust charges pending a hearing. And instead of trying to defend himself, Netanyahu has exploited this possible indictment in order to even further promote his image and represent it as a sort of a conspiracy by the left against him. So he’s kind of using all his populist cards in order to prove that he’s the one who’s being attacked by the judiciary, by the so-called left, that he represents as left. So, he’s kind of trying to use this move, and especially after Trump’s recent declaration of the occupied Golan Heights as being part—as acknowledging Israel’s sovereignty over it. Netanyahu is just using every card that he has in order to manage—in order to win elections for another time.
But again, regardless of what will happen after the indictment, if there will be an indictment, it’s obviously very clear now that Netanyahu is immersed in corruption. But the thing is, even if he is held accountable or if this—if he’s held accountable, he will only be held accountably in a very small portion, because there are other crimes, besides corruption, that no one’s talking about. We’re now marking a year to the March or Return protests. There have been almost 200 Palestinians who have been murdered—unarmed Palestinians who have been murdered in these protests. There are 7,000 wounded Palestinians. And no one’s talking about holding Netanyahu and his government accountable. There is this tendency among the liberal Israeli elite to just talk about violations when it comes to corruption. But no one, among all of them, is talking about the violations that the military, on the behest of Netanyahu, has committed. And this is precisely why, again, I think that many Palestinians within the Green Line have reached this conclusion, that after decades of Israeli colonialism and of Israeli expansion and of continued violations and of continued and the escalation of racist laws that have always been the norm in Israel since 1948, it’s time to change our strategy. Instead of giving this legitimacy to Israel, it’s time to remove this sleeve of legitimacy and kind of take, adopt other strategies in our resistance to Israeli colonialism.
________
Budour Hassan
Palestinian writer and project coordinator for the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid and Human Rights.
Jehad Abusalim
scholar and policy analyst from Gaza. He runs the Gaza Unlocked campaign for the United States for the American Friends Service Committee.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 26, 2019