Israeli Police invade Al-Aqsa mosque, ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrar and mobs chanting‘Death to the Arabs’ - this is what Labour's fake 'antisemitism' campaign was designed to defend
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Interview Mona al Kurd
Today we are seeing a repeat of the events of October 2000:
In early October 2000, Palestinian citizens of Israel staged mass demonstrations in towns and villages throughout the country to protest the government’s oppressive policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the beginning of the Second Intifada.
During these demonstrations in Israel, the police and special police sniper units killed 13 unarmed Palestinians (12 citizens of Israel, 1 resident of Gaza) and injured hundreds more using live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets (“rubber bullets”), and tear gas. Israeli Jewish citizens also attacked Palestinian citizens of Israel, their property and their holy sites in early October 2000.
Despite the Or Commission finding no justification for these murders, not a single officer was ever charged with the killings. Just one Jewish demonstrator has been killed by Israeli security forces in the entire history of the Israeli state. This statistic in itself demonstrates the racist and apartheid nature of the Israeli state.
Israeli settlers and pogromists, to say nothing of Orthodox Jews, throw stones and engage in violence but Israeli Police always manage to contain them without using live fire which is reserved solely for Palestinians.
The attacks on Palestinians in Bat Yam, Jaffa, Acre and other cities throughout Israel is not the first time that Israeli Jews have engaged in pogroms against the Palestinian minority in Israel.
As Israel resorts to the only thing it knows, the murder of Palestinians, bombing and mass destruction in Gaza, the background to what is happening can be summed up in a nutshell. It is Israel's colonial momentum towards ethnic cleansing and the racial purification of Jerusalem, symbolised by the attack on Al Aqsa mosque last Friday.
Itamar Gvir MK and Aryeh King, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem taunt Palestinians
Just imagine that Iranian police had invaded a Jewish synagogue in Tehran and attacked worshippers. Iran has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel. There would have been no shortage of voices denouncing what had happened.
Despite the lies and false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ directed at supporters of the Palestinians over the past 5 years, the truth about Israel and what a ‘Jewish’ state means, is becoming more widely understood.
2021 began with Btselem, Israel’s principal and most respected human rights organisation, issuing a statement‘THIS IS APARTHEID - A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea:’
Human Rights Watch, a conservative human rights organisation which is close to the State Department and whose agenda is subservient to US foreign policy, brought out a 231 page report A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” HRW found the Israeli state guilty of the crime of apartheid. Kenneth Roth, its Executive Director said in a press release:
“Prominent voices have warned for years that apartheid lurks just around the corner if the trajectory of Israel’s rule over Palestinians does not change,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
No matter how many times the Zionist lobby and its Starmer-like puppets cry ‘anti-Semitism’, the daily reality of land confiscations, ethnic cleansing, settler and police violence win out.
If I don’t steal your house someone else will steal it!
We even saw Emily Maitless on BBC Newsnight, usually the flagship of Israeli hasbara, giving the Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli, a religious nut on the far-right of Likud, who had previously given her support to the fascist anti-miscegenation group Lehava, a grilling.
In March Israel held its fourth general election in two years and once again there was a political stalemate. Two-thirds of the Knesset, some 80 seats, belong to the far-Right. The two Labour Zionist parties – the Israeli Labour Party and Meretz gained just 13 seats between them. When you consider that in 1949 in Israel’s first General Election Mapai (ILP) and Mapam (now Meretz) gained 65 out of 120 seats, you can see the extent of their decline. Indeed this was a marked improvement over the previous election in which these same two parties gained just 6 seats.
The first rule when forming a government coalition in Israel is that no Arab party can be included. Indeed no coalition can even rest on the support of Arab parties ‘from the outside.’ What probably led to the assassinationof Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was the fact that the coalition government rested on the support of the Communist Hadash, a largely Arab party, to get support for the Oslo Accords through the Knesset.
Israeli politics is seen through the prism of support or opposition to Netanyahu, its criminal and longest serving Prime Minister. Netanyahu is desperate to avoid being convicted for fraud but it is a mistake to reduce everything to Netanyahu’s individual fate. The crisis in Israeli politics goes deeper.
Likud is the largest party in the Knesset holding 30 seats, a quarter of all seats. His coalition can count on the 16 votes of two religious Zionist parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. Thanks to Netanyahu acting as a midwife to the amalgamation of 3 far-Right parties, Tkuma/Religious Zionism and the Kahanist Oztma Yehudit, a Judeo-Nazi party and Noam, a virulently anti-gay party, he can count on a further 6 votes making 52 votes in all.
Israeli Police deliberately set out to provoke the disturbances by preventing Palestinians sitting down on the gates outside the Damascus Gate
The opposition is equally divided and disparate. It consists of the remnants of Labour Zionism with 13 seats, Yamina – a religious Zionist party led by Naftali Bennett with 7 seats, Yisrael Beteinu, a secular far-Right Russian party led by Avigdor Lieberman also with 7 seats, New Hope a far-Right party led by former Likud Minister Gideon Saar with 6 seats and the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid with 17 seats. Blue and White, led by former Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, is currently part of Netanyahu’s coalition with a further 8 seats. The only thing that unites the opposition to Likud is a hatred of Netanyahu, so the ‘left wing’ Meretz is happy to sit in the same coalition with Avigdor Lieberman, who has previously talked of drowning thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea.
The problem for Netanyahu’s Zionist opponents is that the 3 far right parties are unwilling to rely on the support of an Arab party and Religious Zionism is likewise unwilling to rely on the support of the conservative Arab Ra’am party with 4 seats . This is why a fifth election in 2 years beckons. Zionism faces an impossible dilemma - just what does a Jewish state mean? Is it a religious or a secular state?
But if Israel lacks a functioning government there is a racist consensus among all Zionist parties which is that Israeli Palestinians need to be confined to as little land as possible. That is why in the 73 years of Israel’s existence not one Arab town or community has been created whereas hundreds of Jewish communities have been created. 93% of Israeli ‘national’ land is reserved for Jews via the Israeli Land Authority and the JNF. Palestinians, some 20% of Israel’s population, are confined to about 2% of the land.
Throughout Israel’s existence there has been a continuous process of confiscation of what is left of the Palestinian’s land. This has been achieved through the use of two laws – the 1950 Absentee Property Law which should have been called the Legalisation of Theft of Palestinian Land Law. It meant the creation of the Orwellian term, Present-Absentees. Palestinians could move just a mile down the road to avoid hostilities, as happened to the villagers in Kafr Birim and Ikrit, who moved out at the suggestion of the Zionist militias in 1948 after having been promised they could move back in after the hostilities. They ended up being classified as present-absentees and it was the Mapam kibbutz of Baram which stole their land!
This law was supplemented by the 1970 Law on Legal and Administrative Affairs which was enacted in order that Jews who lost their property in East Jerusalem in 1948 can reclaim their property.
In 1948 as a result of the ethnic cleansing and war that accompanied Israel’s birth, Jews who lived in East Jerusalem relocated to West Jerusalem and took over the property of Palestinians who had fled. The 1970 law allowed them to reclaim their original property in East Jerusalem. However there was no equivalence. The 45,000 Palestinians who lost their property in West Jerusalem had no right to reclaim it. Why? Because Israel is a Jewish state. And that is why in a nutshell Israel, as a Jewish state, is inherently a racist state.
What sparked off the current crisis was the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers. Through a variety of legal tricks those who have been living for over 70 years in Sheikh Jarrar are facing eviction after the courts ruled against them. We have to remember that Israeli courts are Zionist colonial courts. Their rulings are based on acceptance of the idea that Israel is a Jewish state. They operate within a Zionist consensus which holds that Palestinians are there on sufferance. They do not recognise international law and in this they are backed up by the United States and the Biden Administration.
It is not even the original Jewish inhabitants of these properties who are attempting to return to them. They have already been compensated with ‘abandoned’ Palestinian property. Their title to the properties has been bought up by Zionist settler companies.
Although East Jerusalem has been annexed to Israel its Palestinians have not been granted Israeli citizenship. Instead they have been given ‘permanent residence’. Except that it’s not permanent and can be revoked at a stroke. For example if you leave Israel to study abroad and don’t return after 7 years you will effectively become stateless. If you are accused of ‘disloyalty’ then your residence status can be removed or if you want to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank then you have to move because you can’t bring your partner to live with you. You can vote in local but not national elections but your services are markedly inferior to those of Jewish citizens even though you are expected to pay the same taxes.
What lies behind the ethnic cleansing is Jerusalem’s 2020 Master Plan which aims to “maintain a solid Jewish majority in the city” by encouraging Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. There have been three such plans for Jerusalem; the Jerusalem 2020 Master Plan, the Marom Plan and the Jerusalem 5800 Plan. Each of these plans reinforces each other. Their common goal is to increase the number of Jewish residents and reduce the number of Palestinians living in Jerusalem. Details of each master plan can be read in the article Which Jerusalem? Israel’s Little-Known Master Plans. The aim is to achieve a 70/30 Jewish demographic majority.
Although the Israeli government pretends that the ‘eviction’ of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrar is a ‘real estate problem’ the reality is clear. As Jerusalem’s far-Right Deputy Mayor, Aryeh King openly stated, seizing Sheikh Jarrah homes is part of a wider strategy. It is “the way to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.”
Israel unilaterally annexed occupied East Jerusalem in 1980. It has, to date, expropriated from Palestinians nearly one-third of the land in East Jerusalem, and built 11 Jewish-only neighborhoods in them. The permanent resident status of at least 14,701 Palestinians from East Jerusalem has been revoked. Israel has facilitated the settlement of more than 200,000 of its civilian population in East Jerusalem. It has also cut the city off from the occupied West Bank, to which it has been historically closely connected, by settlements and the apartheid wall.
This is the background to the attack by Israeli Police on worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque injuring over 300 Palestinians on the holiest day of Ramadan. Israeli Police thugs invaded the mosque firing stun grenades and sound bombs and beating all around. This followed the Police provocation at the Damascus Gate when the steps that lead down from the entrance were sealed off by the Police preventing Palestinians sitting down and enjoying their meal after breaking their fast in Ramadan. Palestinians in Jerusalem of course are never consulted by a Police force that considers them lower than human. Israel is a democratic state for Jews and a Jewish state for Arabs.
The attacks on Haram al-Sharif which is the third holiest site in Islam cannot be separated from the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. The goal of the Jewish settlers is to demolish Al Aqsa Mosque and the Golden Dome and replace them with the Third Temple at which Jewish Messianic madmen will be able to sacrifice live animals to their god. Messianism has been the handmaiden of the settlements in the attempt to restore the rule of Jewish law in Israel.
It is not well known but there are signs from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate at the entrance to the Temple Mount forbidding observant Jews from entering. Not out of any concern for Islam but because, as the site of the second Temple, it is forbidden for observant Jews to go there in case they trespass on the Holy of Holies which was the preserve of the High Priest who had access to god. The Jewish settlers see the Temple Mount as simply another stage in their desire to Judaise Jerusalem and evict the indigenous population.
Hamas in Gaza decided to offer solidarity by firing rockets into Israel. It seems that these rockets are no longer the pea shooters of 2014. If Richard Silverstein’s Tikkun Olam is to be believed, Iranian cruise missiles have been imported into Gaza via the tunnels from Egypt. If true then we are entering a new ball game. The destruction of a bus in Tel Aviv and reports of deaths elsewhere suggests that deaths in future attacks on Gaza may not be so one-sided. In which case we may see a new invasion of Gaza with all that that portends being raised by the far-Right.
Tony Greenstein