THIS PAST WEEK, THE WORLD HAS WITNESSED THE SHOCKING IMAGES OF ISRAELI BOMBS POUND GAZA, DESTROYING RESIDENTIAL AREAS AND LEADING TO 139 DEATHS, INCLUDING 39 CHILDREN AND 22 WOMEN. BUT THE WORLD HAS ALSO WITNESSED SOMETHING ELSE: THE RESISTANCE OF THE PALESTINIANS ON A SCALE RARELY SEEN. IN THIS FEATURE, ADAM JOHANNES, A LONG-TIME ACTIVIST AND READER ON PALESTINE, ASSESSES HOW THE FIGHT AGAINST ETHNIC CLEANSING IN SHEIKH JERRRA, EAST JERUSALEM, HAS SPARKED A WIDER REBELLION AGAINST ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST OPPRESSIVE STATES AND ITS WESTERN BACKERS.
Feature by Adam Johannes
This month the unarmed popular resistance of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood of East Jerusalem under illegal Israeli occupation, made international headlines. Largely reported as an eviction battle, for Palestinians it is a battle against racism, apartheid and over seventy years of ethnic cleansing.
The families facing eviction are Palestinian refugees. Sheikh Jarrah is home to around 3,000 Palestinian refugees. They originally lived in what is now Israel, but were expelled or fled during the ethnic cleansing of 1948 that accompanied the birth of the new state.
During the creation of Israel, 85% of its native Palestinian population were displaced as three-quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees. Over 400 Palestinian villages were demolished shortly after, to wipe out the memory that another society had flourished for generations, and block the refugees from returning home. Israel also passed an Absentees’ Property Law, designating Palestinians forced to flee – and blocked from returning – as “absentees” with their properties seized by the state who often gave them to arriving Israelis.
Palestinians call these events, Al-Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’). For over seventy years Israel has violated international law refusing to allow Palestinian refugee families to ever return to the land where they and their ancestors lived for generations.
In 1956, Jordan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) settled 28 refugee families in Sheikh Jarrah. They were promised legal ownership of their land and homes, but this never materialised.
After the 1967 war, the Israeli military occupation of East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza began. Jewish settler organisations then began to lay claim to the homes of the Palestinian refugees in Sheikh Jarrah.
By the early 1970s, settler groups began to tell the refugees that they were trespassing on Jewish owned land. A 1970 Israeli law allows Jewish people to reclaim properties their families owned in East Jerusalem before 1948. There is no similar law allowing much larger numbers of Palestinians expelled in 1948 from their land in Israel to reclaim their properties.
ISRAELI APARTHEID IN EAST JERUSALEM
In recent months, an Israeli court has issued eviction orders against many Palestinian refugee families in Sheikh Jarrah and two other neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem. Each evicted Palestinian family would have to pay thousands to cover settlers legal expenses. Over 1000 Palestinians face ethnic cleansing and being re-traumatised as the already displaced are cruelly displaced again.
Within the framework of a ‘two-state solution’ East Jerusalem is traditionally seen as the capital of a future state of Palestine, and essential for any viable Palestinian state, many Zionists view all of a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Israel claims all residents of Jerusalem whether Arab or Jewish have equal rights, but the reality under apartheid is different.
Jews born in East Jerusalem get Israeli citizenship, while Palestinians are treated like foreign citizens with a form of ‘permanent residency’ that confers fewer rights and can be revoked if they spend too much time living outside the city. Unlike Israeli Jews, Palestinian residents must prove that Jerusalem is their “center of life” if they are to retain the Jerusalem ID card without which they cannot gain access to the city, its markets and services.
In order to isolate and control Palestinians in small and disconnected enclaves the Israeli government has built many huge new and illegal Jewish settlements and neighbourhoods across and surrounding East Jerusalem.
Hundreds of Palestinian homes are demolished each year while barely any building permits for Palestinian housing are allowed creating a massive housing shortage and a push for Palestinians to leave.
Meanwhile another form of ethnic cleansing are evictions of Palestinians from their homes. Highly-funded Jewish settler organisations supported by Israeli courts, police and government are slowly taking over established Palestinian areas of the city.
PEOPLE-POWER
How did the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah come to trend across social media globally? For a decade, families in Sheikh Jarrah have staged weekly protests, but the rebellion in Sheikh Jarrah exploded a few weeks ago.
Israeli Jewish settlers and Israeli police had escalated harassment of the Palestinian families facing eviction in the run up to an expected court decision. In protest, the families staged sit-ins, setting up a tent village and protest camp.
Soon Palestinian youth took leadership. Social media regularly updated people on the protests and police repression sparked solidarity marches by Palestinian communities across Israel and across the occupied territories. Palestinians in Israel would travel for hours to join the sit-in protests in Sheikh Jarrah, while the families in Sheikh Jarrah would often travel to join protests elsewhere.
In one memorable protest when Israeli police blocked the traditional pilgrimage of buses from Palestinian communities in Israel travelling to the Al-Aqsa Mosque for Ramadan prayers, Palestinians took direct action to shut down the main road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with pilgrims staging a ‘pray-in’ blocking traffic and praying on the highway in protest.
News of the roadblock was spread on social media, and hundreds of young men from nearby Arab villages and Jerusalem flocked to join. Some drove cars the wrong way down the now-empty Jerusalem-bound lanes picking up pilgrims who had left their cars to trek by foot to Al-Aqsa.
Food has also become a form of resistance. Iftar is the name of the evening meal with which Muslims end their daily Ramadan fast at sunset. During this year’s Ramadan, families facing eviction from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah movingly turned Iftar meals into a powerful act of solidarity and celebration of Palestinian culture and heritage.
Large community Iftar meals with long tables in the open air spreading across streets aimed to draw international attention to their community struggle against eviction. Many Palestinians travelled from further afield to break their fast with the families. Fasting together then breaking bread together created a powerful spirit of solidarity that many hoped might continue to bear fruit long after the end of the holy month.
A few days ago, armed Israeli Jewish settlers violently assaulted the communal meal of families in Sheikh Jarrah, upturning their tables, invading their homes and attacking parents and children. Even before this they had regularly carried out acts of provocation – swearing, pelting people with eggs and stones, playing loud songs in Hebrew during the call to prayer.
In East Jerusalem, night after night Palestinians protested the pending evictions facing stun grenades, water cannon, mass injury and arrest. Israeli attempts to ban Palestinian Muslims from gathering in public space in the old city of Jerusalem during the holy month of Ramadan swelled protests sparking daily police attacks on the Palestinians. Each act of police repression only served to make the protests bigger.
On Friday 7th May, shockingly Israeli police broke into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest religious site, after Ramadan prayers. Stun grenades and rubber-coated metal bullets were unleashed on hundreds of Palestinian worshippers with over 200 injured. Protests at the Damascus Gate and Sheikh Jarrah heroically went on into the night in the face of extreme state repression.
The aim was to clear the way for an annual far-right march, the Jerusalem Day Flag March that passes through the Old City, the Arab quarter of Jerusalem that is always accompanied by Israeli flags, nationalist songs and chants of ‘Death to the Arabs!’ and usually attempted physical attacks. The march commemorates conquest and humiliation for the Palestinians, the day East Jerusalem was illegally occupied in 1967.
On Saturday 8th May, in a deliberate provocation Israeli police sought to prevent tens of thousands of devout Muslims joining prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque for Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, a sacred night that marks the day Muslims believe the Quran was first sent down from Heaven to the world and the night when the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the prophet Muhammad.
When the Israeli police and army sought to prevent Palestinian youth from congregating at the Damascus Gate – a main entrance to the Old City not far from Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood – with barricades, fences, water cannon, stun grenades and mounted police, an electrifying protest saw demonstrators pull down barricades, tear down fences and drive Israeli security forces back.
Prominent Palestinian activist, Mohammed Abu Hummus, a member of the al-Issawiya popular committee in occupied East Jerusalem expressed the exhilaration of the moment saying, ‘the victory at Damascus Gate gave the youth power, they saw they can get results, and now they’ll go anywhere the occupation exists –like here.’
Meanwhile the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, flanked by settlers and far right activists, was recorded telling Muhammad Abu Hummus that it was a “pity” he didn’t get a bullet in his head.
On Sunday, the Israeli authorities announced the flag march was re-routed away from the Damascus Gate and the Old City. The Israeli High Court of Justice postponed hearings on the planned evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah scheduled for Jerusalem Day: A huge victory for the rebellion.
WHO ARE THE PALESTINIANS?
Currently over 5 million Palestinians suffer under Israeli military occupation or siege on the West Bank, in Gaza and East Jerusalem.
5-6 million Palestinians are refugees, one of the largest and most consistent refugee populations in the world made up of Palestinian families and their descendants forced from Israel over seventy years ago. Israel still refuses to allow them to return to their homeland.
In most versions of the ‘two-state solution’ – a state of Palestine, side by side, with a state of Israel – the right of return is ignored. This is not because it is physically impossible for Israel to absorb the refugees, but because it would increase the Arab population making a Jewish state untenable. From the perspective of universal human rights there is no more obligation to maintain a Zionist state than an apartheid South Africa.
Almost 2 million Palestinians still live in what is now Israel, a small remnant of the Palestinians who lived there in larger numbers for generations who escaped ethnic cleansing in 1948.
As Palestinians they became third class citizens of Israel with more than sixty racist laws passed by Israel since 1948 to deny them true equal citizenship as non-Jews in what is now defined as a Jewish state. Over 90% of land in Israel is owned by state bodies privileging Jewish over non-Jewish citizens making it extremely difficult for Palestinian citizens of Israel to live in most of the country.
Both Jews and Arabs can have citizenship, but only Jews can have nationality and enjoy full civil rights. The Civil Rights movement within Israel argues that for Israel to be democratic, it should redefine itself from being a Jewish State towards being a ‘state of all its citizens’.
PALESTINIAN UPRISING IN ISRAEL
“The solution does not lie with the state. These people will not get a new home from the state. The solution is popular resistance, which is why I’m here out in the street. That’s the only solution.
There is no solution by the government or the parliament, they don’t offer a real solution. The only solution will come from the streets, from the people, which is why you now see demonstrations everywhere, in Sheikh Jarrah, in Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth and all Arab cities.
Despite all the attempts of the state to divide us, we have solidarity as a nation. Our struggle is one.”
Rawan Basharat, 38, Jaffa, quoted in Haaretz, 13 May.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have been the backbone of the rebellion in East Jerusalem. They organised convoys of buses, swelled protest numbers at Sheikh Jarrah and joined the defence of the al-Aqsa mosque. When Israeli police attacked the mosque protests erupted in Israel itself across the main Palestinian towns and the Arab-Jewish ‘mixed-cities’ in the biggest protest wave since the outbreak of the last Palestinian Intifada in the early 2000s which saw 13 civil rights protesters shot dead.
Night after night a new generation of Palestinians in Israel has faced down Israeli police violence and vigilante violence from far-right Jewish-Israeli groups who have attacked and looted Arab-owned businesses. On Wednesday, footage appeared of a driver being dragged from his car and savagely beaten because he looked like an Arab. Hundreds of onlookers watched the beating that many described as a lynching.
The protests are against racism against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, but against racism against Palestinians in Israel, where the state calls its indigenous people, ‘Israeli Arabs’ even seeking to suppress their Palestinian heritage. The anger at decades of racism, poverty and discrimination towards non-Jews in the Jewish state, that has been bubbling for years is again at boiling point. The protests re-affirm that Palestinians living in Israel, or 1948 Palestine, are part of the wider Palestinian people.
GAZA: BIGGEST OPEN AIR PRISON ON EARTH
At time of writing Israel’s bombing of Gaza has killed over 100 people, more than quarter of them children. This follows years of periodic massacres perpetrated by Israel on a population of largely children and refugees.
Over two-thirds of the people of Gaza are refugees, families driven from their homes just over seventy years ago from what is now Israel. Just over half of the people of Gaza are under 18, children. A population of almost two million, mostly refugees and children then are caught in what has been described as the ‘biggest open air prison on earth’ in one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
Powerful states in the world led by the US refuse to pressure Israel to restore justice and give Palestinians human rights, and instead increase arms sales to Israel of hi-tech weaponry. The Palestinian resistance, lacking Israel’s guided precision missiles, occasionally respond to the crimes of their oppressor by firing primitive rockets at Israel.
Yet Israel’s bombing has killed more Palestinians this week than Israelis killed over the last decade by rockets. This sums up the political, ethical and military asymmetry of this ‘conflict’ whose violence is rooted in Israel’s denial of Palestinian human rights. When Palestinians in Gaza have attempted unarmed mass resistance such as the ‘Great Return March’ the ‘international community’ allowed Israel to shoot them down.
Following years of military occupation, Gaza has been subject to fifteen years of siege, blockaded by land, air and sea as the territory becomes uninhabitable. Over 90% of Gaza drinking water is now water unfit for human consumption. A million children are being slowly poisoned while being denied any future.
The siege was collective punishment by Israel and the West for electing Hamas in 2006 in free and fair elections that Hamas won because they were seen as expressing resistance – rather than collaboration or surrender – to Israeli occupation. Following their election, Hamas had offered Israel a ten year truce for negotiations, a peace process, if they withdrew militarily from the occupied territories. This was rejected.
THIS IS APARTHEID
In January, B’Tselem, the main Jewish-Israeli human-rights organisation monitoring the Occupied Territories for the first time described Israel/Palestine as, ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid. More than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule’.
In April, Human Rights Watch released an explosive report arguing the “threshold” had been crossed and Israel/Palestine was now apartheid based on an overarching policy to “maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”. For the first time in its history, the world’s leading human rights organisation, directly accused the Israeli state of the crime of apartheid and crimes against humanity.
POLITICAL FRAGMENTATION OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
In the late 1960s the Palestinian resistance and global solidarity movement used to argue the issue was apartheid-style racism and the solution was for Israel/Palestine to be superseded by one secular democratic state where Arabs, Muslims, Christians and Jews would live together with full equal rights – the ‘one state solution. This vision also affirmed the unity of the Palestinian people whether they lived in Israel, the Occupied Territories or the diaspora.
By the 1980s, much of the Palestinian resistance and global solidarity movement in defeat and despair gave up on liberation and instead the goal became simply ending the 1967 military occupation and building alongside Israel, a Palestinian mini-state on less than quarter of historical Palestine incorporating the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Such a state would likely be dominated economically and militarily by Israel, but Israel showed as little interest in the two-state solution as the one-state solution preferring continued expansion and domination.
It was never said openly, but the turn to a two-state solution meant abandoning the right of return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel, and abandoning the civil rights movement of Palestinians who constitute one fifth of Israel’s population demanding true equal citizenship.
When Palestinians living in Israel raised their voice against a racist state, their voice was erased by liberals in the West as inconvenient to the two-state illusion. Henceforth, Israel was to be portrayed as a normal liberal democracy that simply needed to end its 1967 occupation. The struggle of Palestinians within Israel or the state’s ‘original sin’ – expelling the majority of its native population and never allowing them to return – was to be forgotten.
More recently many Arab states even begun to ‘normalise’ relations with Israel believing the Palestinian question dead and buried.
The political fragmentation of the Palestinian people was complete. Or so it appeared.
“ALL CHANGED, CHANGED UTTERLY: A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN”
In 2018/19 the Great Return March saw tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees in Gaza face live ammunition as they marched symbolically to the border with Israel to remind the world – including Israel, the United States and the Palestinian leadership – that seventy years on, international law still guarantees their right of return to live where their families lived for generations.
Today Palestinians are protesting across Israel, East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories while armed factions launch rockets from Gaza.
Protesters on Friday cut security barbed wired fences and crossed the border from Jordan into West Bank. Many are from Palestinian refugee families who in 1948 were forced to walk on foot to Jordan after being driven from their homes at gunpoint by Zionist militia. Protesters chant, “The people want to liberate Palestine” and call upon the King to open the border. Thousands of Jordanians are still traveling by car and by foot to the Israeli “border” surrounding the Occupied West Bank, to show solidarity with Palestinians there and protest against killing of civilians in Gaza. Thousands have also massed at the Lebanese border with Israel while Egyptian doctors get ready to aid people in Gaza.
The popular uprising is spreading, and around the world people are taking to the streets in solidarity. In the Italian port of Livorno dockers this week have refused to load weapons bound for Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people. If Western Governments won’t impose an arms embargo on Israel then workers action will.
A possibility of a new ‘intifada without borders’, a grassroots rebellion across all of historic Palestine, involving all sections of the Palestinian people, mostly independent of the traditional Palestinian leadership, sparking unrest across the Middle East must terrify the ruling classes of Israel, the Arab world and the West. And this takes place against a second wave of the Arab Spring with significant recent uprisings and protests in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq and elsewhere.
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
The roots of the Israel/Palestine conflict are that one people (the British state) promised another people (Zionist settlers) the land of a third people (Palestinian Arabs) without their consent. Today the British state continues to arm Israel and back the state politically and diplomatically. We have a moral duty to stand with the Palestinians and against our state. Our international solidarity will bring hope to the beleaguered people of Palestine, just as their steadfast refusal to surrender after decades of dispossession can bring us hope.
In this week’s Queen Speech, the Tories promise to legislate against the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, a non-violent campaign aiming to isolate Israel as we isolated South Africa until it abandoned apartheid.
This follows five years of de-mobilisation of Palestine solidarity as the Labour, Momentum and trade union leaderships, Welsh Government, Plaid Cymru, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party and others collapsed behind the bogus IHRA definition of antisemitism that sought to silence those of us who believe Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.
Yet just over six years ago, during the summer of 2014, over 3,000 people marched through Cardiff in the biggest march in solidarity with the Palestinians in Welsh history. This weekend’s protests must be the start of rebuilding the movement and taking the cause of Palestine into workplaces, schools, colleges, universities, trade unions, student unions, faith groups, political parties, and other institutions and associations.
