On Sunday, many Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities boycotted President Biden’s virtual Eid celebration. We play a statement of solidarity from legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis on Sunday for “Eid with Palestine: A Protest of the White House Eid Event.” Davis also co-wrote piece for The Nation with our guest Noura Erakat about how Erakat’s 26-year-old cousin Ahmad Erekat was shot by Israeli occupation forces after his car appeared to have accidentally crashed into a booth at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank while he was on the way to pick up his mother and sister on her wedding day. Erakat says Israel still refuses to release his body to his family. “All Palestinians are deemed a threat for their mere existence,” says Erakat. “What we see happen to Ahmad has been a pattern.”
The way that this fits within the larger frame has to do with Israel’s expanding use of force. We have to be careful when we’re calling for international law and to describe what Israel is doing as war crimes, because Israel’s work is also in the battle of changing what the law means. It is shrinking who counts as a Palestinian civilian. It regards Palestinians as already always being a threat until proven innocent. All Palestinians are deemed a threat for their mere existence in challenging the Zionist settler-colonial mythology of uninterrupted Jewish spacial and temporal presence.
What we see happen to Ahmad has been a pattern and practice that the U.N. has documented and said that Israel shoots as a matter of precautionary measure. In some cases, they have placed weapons alongside the Palestinian bodies. We saw this manifest most cruelly during the Gaza March of Return, when snipers shot down hundreds of Palestinian Gandhis, so to speak — for all those who keep saying, “If only Palestinians would be peaceful.” We have been nothing but. The question
— source democracynow.org | May 20, 2021