MadisonRafah.org

The Madison-Rafah Sister City Project

MadisonRafah.org

Tag Archives: Jenin

The narcissism that blinds Israelis to Jenin’s oppression

Posted on by

Not only did the anti-government protests not condemn the assault on Jenin, its leaders even praised the ‘brave men’ who took part in the invasion.


Israelis block the Ayalon Highway during a protest against the Israeli government’s planned judicial overhaul and in response to the removal of Tel Aviv District Commander Amichai Eshed in Tel Aviv, July 5, 2023. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

Orly Noy, +972 Magazine, July 7, 2023

As the drums of Israeli protesters continued to beat in Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and other locations across the country this week, the Israeli army began winding down a brutal invasion and assault on Jenin refugee camp that left behind destruction, devastation, and blood.

The sight of Palestinian refugees fleeing their homes in the dark, their hands raised over their heads, not only conjures memories of the Nakba. It is a reminder that the dispossession of Palestinians has never ended — that these very families either lost their homes in 1948, or are the descendants of those who did. Palestinians know full well that they are facing a belligerent, uninhibited state that, in the guise of security and victimhood, will spare no effort — dispossession, killing, ethnic cleansing. And perhaps the worst is yet to come.

Banner homepage/post desktop

Israel is used to presenting the occupation to the world as an internal Israeli matter, while its Jewish citizens are used to treating it as a matter of foreign affairs, disconnected from everyday life, like a war in some distant country. This, along with the deeply-seated militarism and the blind worship of the army in Israeli society, means that not only did the anti-government protests not come out against the assault on Jenin, its leaders even praised the “brave men” who took part in the invasion — the same ones who, among other things, bombed the Jenin Freedom Theatre, which serves as a paragon of the human spirit amid the hell that Israel has created in the camp.

As usual, it was Palestinian citizens of Israel who, together with a handful of Jewish activists, immediately led the protest against the army’s crimes in Jenin, and faced severe police violence in return. Meanwhile, faint criticism could also be heard from some on the Zionist left, who accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of launching a military operation in order to divert attention from and ultimately silence the public protest against him.Yet we must not reduce the invasion of Jenin to Netanyahu’s political calculus vis-à-vis the protest movement. The oppression of the Palestinians did not begin this past January with the beginning of the demonstrations, nor will it end when the demonstrations cease. The frequent, lethal attacks on Jenin, as well as the routine assaults on Gaza, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, the encouragement of pogroms by settlers, and the crackdown on Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line — all of these are part of a greater Israeli policy, which is formulated with chilling precision in what Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich calls his Decisive Plan, which seeks to bring Palestinians to heel, and wholesale expel those who refuse to bow their heads.Those who wish to fight for true democracy must let go of the Jewish-Israeli narcissism that stops us from opening our eyes to the places where Israel tramples not only on the idea of democracy, but the very idea of what it means to be human, and begin our struggle from there.

Orly Noy

Orly Noy is an editor at Local Call, a political activist, and a translator of Farsi poetry and prose. She is the chair of B’Tselem’s executive board and an activist with the Balad political party. Her writing deals with the lines that intersect and define her identity as Mizrahi, a female leftist, a woman, a temporary migrant living inside a perpetual immigrant, and the constant dialogue between them.

 

Jenin by American Jewish Cartoonist Eli Valley

Posted on by

Image

Jenin by Eli Valley, July 7, 2023

Jewish Cartoonist Eli Valley Sparks Angry Debate About anti-Semitism

His comics often employ Nazi imagery satirically and he’s explicit about the point: To him, Trump and his allies are modern-day Nazis, and their Jewish supporters are ‘worse-than-kapos’


Eli Valley (Credit: Loubna Mrie)

JTA and Ben Sales, Haaretz, May 12, 2019

Is Eli Valley a brave Jewish artist speaking truth to power at a moment of national crisis? Or is he a self-hating Jew spreading anti-Semitic caricatures and slandering the state of Israel?

Judging by those who’ve stoked the Twitterstorm that’s raged around Valley this week, those seem to be the only two available options.

After a pro-Palestinian group at Stanford University posted flyers about his upcoming appearance as the keynote speaker for Palestine Awareness Week, critics pounced. Bad enough that a Jew would speak at an event sponsored by anti-Zionists, they said, but the cartoons advertising his talk were themselves anti-Semitic in their message and imagery.

Valley dismisses the charge. A Jewish political cartoonist, he has skewered American Jewish leaders — and especially Jewish Republicans — as hypocrites for more than a decade. He’s unsparing in his leftist criticism of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians and what he depicts as the Jewish establishment’s unwavering support of it. A book of his comics, “Diaspora Boy,” was published in 2017.

Since 2015, his pen has stabbed at President Donald Trump, Jared, Ivanka and the people he sees as the administration’s Jewish enablers. His targets include conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, New York Times writers Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens, and, of late, Meghan McCain, the philo-Semitic co-host of “The View.”

Often, those comics — mostly drawn in a ghoulish black and white — employ Nazi imagery satirically. He’s explicit about the point: To him, Trump and his allies are modern-day Nazis, and their Jewish supporters are “worse-than-kapos.” He pointed to Trump retweeting a white nationalist last week and, earlier, a Republican congressman quoting “Mein Kampf” from the floor of the House.

“Trump is a hero of American Nazism,” Valley told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That the GOP is merging with Nazism, merging with anti-Semitism, and merging with virulent Jew-hatred is astonishing.”

Twitter

He’s dived into that idea in his art: One shows Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, at the time both Jewish Trump appointees, in concentration camp uniforms with the label “Sr. Kapo.” Another shows the Republican Jewish Coalition hoping to “Make America Judenrein,” German for empty of Jews. A third shows Weiss, Stephens and others featured in a “Haggadah for Nazi-Friendly Jews.”

For those on his wavelength, Valley is exposing his Jewish targets as hypocrites, enablers and worse.

To Valley’s critics — including some of the aforementioned targets — he is simply attacking Jews in ways that are indistinguishable from the way they’d be portrayed by an anti-Semite.

What sparked the latest Twitter conflagration is an op-ed in The Stanford Daily, the school’s student newspaper, comparing Valley’s comics to Der Stürmer, the Nazi paper.

Valley is scheduled to speak on campus Friday, co-sponsored by two pro-Palestinian groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, and some of his comics were posted to advertise the event. One featured Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, justifying the White House’s draconian immigration policies by inverting the messages of the Passover seder.

“For those unfamiliar with Mr. Valley’s work, it ranges from the morally repugnant to ethically disgusting,” wrote Ari Hoffman, a Stanford law student who is Jewish. “Like most hate, it’s remarkably lacking in insight. It is crude and disgusting, and its ceaseless recourse to Nazi imagery is matched only by its slavish devotion to the age-old tropes of Jewish caricature.”

Then Weiss, an editor for The Times’ op-ed page, shared Hoffman’s essay on Twitter and endorsed his assertion that Valley’s work traffics in “hatred that gloms onto Jews and the Jewish State.”

Then the whole thing blew up. Pro-Israel advocates attacked Valley, like the Israel on Campus Coalition, which also compared the art to Der Sturmer.

Linda Sarsour, the Democratic Socialists of America’s unofficial Jewish caucus and a range of other leftists defended him.

Two women also accused some of Valley’s supporters on Twitter of harassing them with sexist obscenities. Writer Ariel Sobel called it the “worst sexual harassment I’ve ever received online,” and progressive activist Naomi Schmahl tweeted screenshots of the harassment, including someone calling her a “kapo b****” and a “c***.” In a reply to Sobel, Valley wrote that the harassment is “inexcusable and obscene.”

Still others accused Weiss and Hoffman of seeking to censor speakers they disagreed with.

Because of the controversy over the op-ed, Valley’s Stanford talk has been limited to students and faculty.

“I’m not going to let bad faith malicious assholes get me down, but it’s disturbing that a smear campaign was spearheaded by a New York Times columnist, and that lies about my work were spread through the ecosphere,” Valley told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

He added later that he sees Hoffman’s op-ed as of a piece with right-wing attempts to divert attention from white supremacists.

“Nobody has said I’m a member of the Nazi Party,” he said. “But they’re making flat out connections between my work and Nazis at a time when we’re dealing with a white nationalist horror-show.”

Hoffman stands by the comparison, and said Holocaust imagery can “preclude useful conversation rather than enable it.”

“He has every right to his extraordinarily hostile positions on Israel and certain individual Jews,” he said. “But the use of Holocaust imagery is over the line when it’s tied to a kind of grotesqueness, and it’s used to dehumanize certain Jews with which he has political disagreements. That’s a tactic that is gross and is anti-Semitic.”

Valley agrees that his work is grotesque — and to him that’s precisely the point. He says he’s following a long tradition of grotesque artists and political cartoonists, from Otto Dix after World War I to Mad Magazine. Calling his comics Der Sturmer-esque, he and his supporters say, betrays a lack of knowledge of his discipline.

Continue reading →

‘Why did this happen?’

Posted on by

Israel’s raid on Jenin, through the eyes of one family


Hussein Shibly looks out Saturday from his home, which was damaged in the Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank this month. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)

Steve Hendrix and Sufian Taha, The Washington Post, July 9, 2023

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Hussein Shibly walked home after Friday prayers through a city struggling to return from devastation to mere poverty. A bulldozer lifted a crushed car; men patched bullet holes in a rooftop water tank; a fire engine washed soot from a crowded street.

Reaching his family’s home, Shibly climbed the stairs to a living room, reduced to a charred cave by a shoulder-fired missile. “Is this fit to live in?” he asked, standing among the blackened skeletons of couches and chairs. “Why did this happen to us?”

Shibly and his neighbors are reeling from Israel’s largest military operation in the occupied West Bank in decades, a two-day incursion that unleashed firefights and air attacks on these steep streets densely packed with houses.

Israeli forces launch major operation in West Bank city, killing at least 8

Israel said the assault on the Jenin refugee camp, long known as a bastion of armed Palestinian militancy, was a security imperative — to erode the strength of an expanding terrorist base. At least 50 attacks inside Israel this year originated here, officials said. The 12 Palestinians killed in the operation were all known militants, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

But for families trapped in the camp by fighting, it was 44 hours of terror. Thousands of residents did manage to flee. Others hunkered down in bedrooms and bathrooms. Few suffered the range of horrors endured by the Shiblys.


Jenin camp residents clean up Friday after the destruction inflicted during the Israeli military operation July 3 and 4. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)


The paved surface of the camp’s main road was bulldozed during the raid as a measure against hidden explosive devices. (Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post)

Hussein, 69, was up late watching television Sunday, his usual routine after years spent working the night shift at an Israeli meat processing plant. He was born in this camp, where at least 14,000 people, possibly many more, are packed into an area measuring less than half a square kilometer. Poverty and unemployment are rampant. Raids by Israeli commandos are common.

That night, rumors of a big operation were swirling. But no one knew what was coming.

Around 1 a.m. Monday, Hussein saw a report on Israeli news: IDF soldiers had entered the camp. Then he heard drones, many of them. “They are going to bomb,” he thought. Then came an explosion.

The Shibly family lives in nine apartments in three connected houses owned by Hussein and his two brothers. They are accustomed to Israeli raids. Within minutes, dozens of members of the extended family had rushed to the basement.

Continue reading →

Emergency Aid for Jenin and Petition to Congress

Posted on by

As you know Jenin recently endured an especially deadly and destructive assault by the Israeli armed forces.  (See this AlJazeera link for details, pictures and videos).

Please consider donating to the emergency relief campaign organized by our friends at the Middle East Children’s Alliance, details below. You can also send a check to MECA’s mailing address below.

Please sign this petition to Congress from Jewish Voice for Peace condemning Israel’s military invasion of Jenin.

You may also want to read these analytical articles:

Middle East Children's Alliance

 
Dear Friend of Palestinian Children,

“ … it was impossible for the inhabitants of Jenin to sleep, young and old alike. My daughter, Salma, was terrified by the blaring warning sirens that announced the army’s incursion, her tears flowing uncontrollably.”

Mustafa Sheta, Director of MECA’s partner The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp Palestine wrote these words on July 3rd as the Israeli occupation forces launched a brutal invasion of Jenin.

You can read Mustafa’s full account here but first, please make the most generous contribution you can so local initiatives can get aid to people immediately.

For 48 hours the people in the crowded and besieged refugee camp experienced an unbelievable nightmare. The ground shook with the boom of explosions; rounds of Israel’s artillery and machine gun fire drowned out ambulance sirens and shouts and screams. Roads were littered with bullet casings and broken glass, and the air was filled with teargas. In scenes reminiscent of the Nakba, Israeli soldiers tear-gassed children and parents as they fled the refugee camp, their home since they were expelled from their villages 75 years ago, in search of somewhere safer.

3,000 people were displaced, 140 were injured (20 in critical condition) and 13 were killed, including four children.  Homes, roads, water networks, schools, clinics, and community centers are damaged or destroyed.  The physical and psychological damage is immense.

Please don’t wait.

Make your secure online contribution now so that MECA’s Palestinian partners in Jenin can continue to deliver food, water, first aid, and more to the traumatized and displaced children in Jenin.  

With appreciation for your solidarity and support,
The entire MECA Team

Middle East Children’s Alliance
1101 8th Street, Suite 100
Berkeley, CA 94710

In Jenin, Israel is unveiling the next phase of apartheid

Posted on by

Palestinians in West Bank cities are fast discovering that if their expulsion won’t be possible, Gazafication will be their future.

Palestinians gather around parts of an Israeli armored vehicle after it was destroyed during clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters in the West Bank city of Jenin, June 19, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
Palestinians gather around parts of an Israeli armored vehicle after it was destroyed during clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters in the West Bank city of Jenin, June 19, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)

Amjad Iraqi, +972 Magazine, June 30, 2023

This article originally appeared in “The Landline,” +972’s weekly newsletter. Subscribe here.

The horrifying sight of settler pogroms last week, in which hundreds of Israelis rampaged through Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank after a deadly shooting in the settlement of Eli, has pushed Israel’s security authorities into a very uncomfortable corner. Embarrassed by the viral images of burning homes, charred vehicles, and destroyed businesses, the army, police, and Shin Bet jointly denounced the attacks as “nationalist terrorism” that “contradict every moral and Jewish value.” The IDF has been particularly eager to present itself as a responsible body that will restore law and order, promising to take every measure against those “who act in a violent and extreme manner inside the Palestinian towns.”

Putting aside the glaring fact that the army is one of the principal institutions providing settlers with the resources, protection, and confidence to carry out such wanton violence, there is another reason why this public relations maneuver should be called out for the farce that it is.

On June 19, just days before the pogroms, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired missiles into the West Bank city of Jenin during a fierce battle between raiding army units and Palestinian fighters, purportedly to “provide cover” for evacuating wounded soldiers; five Palestinians including a 15-year-old boy were killed, and 90 were injured. Two days later, an Israeli drone fired at a Palestinian militant cell near Jenin, said to target gunmen responsible for several attacks including at a checkpoint. Both operations were quickly overshadowed in the ensuing days by the Eli shooting and the settler violence that followed.

Far from being one-off incidents, the aerial assaults reveal a dangerous phase in the evolution of Israel’s occupation. The air strikes are reportedly the first in the West Bank in two decades, awakening the nightmares of many Palestinians who ran for cover or suffered wounds from helicopter attacks during the Second Intifada. In that time, though, aerial warfare became the modus operandi in the Gaza Strip, accelerated by Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements in 2005 and the total blockade of the territory following Hamas’ takeover.

Palestinians in Gaza protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Jenin following Israeli military raids into the West Bank city, at the Israel-Gaza border fence, east of Gaza City, June 19, 2023. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90)

Palestinians in Gaza protest in solidarity with Palestinians in Jenin following Israeli military raids into the West Bank city, at the Israel-Gaza border fence, east of Gaza City, June 19, 2023. (Atia Mohammed/Flash90)

This reconfiguration of military rule has intentionally produced a physical and psychological separation between the West Bank and Gaza, abetted by the fratricidal rivalry between Fatah and Hamas. As that distance normalized, the two territories became regarded as disconnected and incomparable. Even well-meaning advocates — in their heavy focus on settlements and annexation — often fell into the trap of forgetting Gaza outside the scope of wartime, deeming it an anomaly in the context of the “one-state reality.” But as many activists, scholars, and experts have warned, the structures used to confine and suppress Gaza are not a deviation from Israel’s methodology, but a natural continuation of it. And that was made clear over the skies of Jenin last week.

Like Gaza, Jenin has long been a center of Palestinian social life and political resistance — and as such, a target of vicious repression. For over a year, the Israeli army has carried out a deadly and protracted operation in the city, repeatedly closing off the region while ground troops break into civilian homes and destroy public infrastructure on a near-weekly basis. The Palestinian armed groups, led by young men who have only known a life of despair and death, have put up a relentless fight, and have recently shown that they can make it even more difficult for Israeli troops to invade — a fact that forced the army to desperately turn to air power last week. The bombardment of a populated urban area, together with the city’s collective punishment, is further justified by the demonization of Jenin as a “cesspool of terrorism” requiring constant intervention — in essence, the same doctrine of “mowing the lawn” that is applied in the blockaded strip a few kilometers away.

As such, Gaza is hardly an exception to the rule of Israeli apartheid. Rather, it is the ultimate bantustan — the model for controlling and weakening a native population in a besieged space, using modern weapons and technology, with local rulers to handle their basic needs, at minimal cost to the settler society surrounding them. West Bank centers like Jenin and Nablus, already subjected to various forms of closure and invasion, are now catching a glimpse of what is yet to come. For many people there, the main experience of Israelis may no longer be of raiding troops or marauding settlers, but of soaring jets and humming drones. If the expulsion of Palestinians won’t be possible, Gazafication will be their future.

That is why it is a morbid joke to hear IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi, days after the settler pogroms, preaching at an army commencement ceremony: “An officer who sees an Israeli citizen, intending to throw a Molotov cocktail at a Palestinian house and stands idly by, cannot be an officer.” The army may feign distress over settlers committing “nationalist terrorism,” but it openly commands its soldiers to do the same, so long as it is done in uniform. Either way, despite Halevi’s claim, it is clear that an Israeli who oversees brutal violence in Gaza can easily find a path to becoming a general-turned-politician. An Israeli inciting the same violence in the West Bank, meanwhile, can now aspire to become minister of national security.

Amjad Iraqi

Amjad Iraqi is a senior editor at +972 Magazine. He is also a policy member of the think tank Al-Shabaka, and was previously an advocacy coordinator at the legal center Adalah. In addition to +972, his writings have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. He is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, based in Haifa.

The Armed Revolt: Why Israel Cannot Crush the Resistance in Palestine

Posted on by


Palestinian residents confront Israeli occupation forces in the Shuafat refugee camp. (Photo: via Activestills.org)

Ramzy Baroud, July 1, 2023

Numbers can be dehumanizing. However, when placed in their proper context, they help to illuminate wider issues and answer urgent questions, such as why is Occupied Palestine at the threshold of a major revolt. And why Israel cannot crush Palestinian resistance no matter how hard, or violently, it tries.

That’s when numbers become relevant. Since the start of this year, nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza. Among them are 27 children.

If one is to imagine a heat map correlating the towns, villages, and refugee camps of the Palestinian victims to the ongoing armed rebellion, one will immediately spot direct connections. Gaza, Jenin, and Nablus, for example, paid the heaviest price for Israeli violence, making them the regions that resist the most.

Unsurprisingly, Palestinian refugees have historically been at the forefront of the Palestinian liberation movement, turning refugee camps such as Jenin, Balata, Aqabat Jabr, Jabaliya, Nuseirat and others, into hot spots of popular and armed resistance. The harder Israel attempts to crush Palestinian resistance, the greater the Palestinian reaction is.

Take Jenin as an example. The rebellious refugee camp has never ceased its resistance to the Israeli occupation since the famous battle and subsequent Israeli massacre of April 2002. The resistance continued there in all of its forms, despite the fact that many of the fighters who defended the camp against the Israeli invasion of the Second Palestinian Uprising, or Intifada were killed or imprisoned.

Now that a new generation has taken over, Israel is at it again. Military incursions of Jenin by Israel have become a routine, resulting in a mounting number of casualties, though at a price for Israel itself.

The most notable and violent of these incursions was on January 26, when the Israeli army invaded the camp, killed ten Palestinians, and wounded over twenty others.

More Palestinians continue to be killed as Israeli raids become more frequent. And the more recurrent the raids, the tougher the resistance, which has swelled beyond the confines of Jenin itself to nearby illegal Jewish settlements, military checkpoints, and so on. It is common knowledge that many of the Palestinians who Israel accuses of carrying out operations against its soldiers and settlers come from Jenin.

Israelis may want to think of their violence in Palestine as self-defense. But that is simply inaccurate. A military occupier, whether in Palestine – or anywhere else, for that matter – cannot, by strict legal definition, be in a state of self-defense. The latter concept only applies to sovereign nations that attempt to defend against threats at or within their internationally recognized borders.

Not only is Israel defined by the international community and law as an ‘Occupying Power’, but it is also legally obligated to “ensure that the civilian population is protected against all acts of violence,” as a statement by the Secretary-General of the United Nations stated on June 20.

The statement was a reference to the killing of eight Palestinians in Jenin, a day earlier. The victims included two children, Sadil Ghassan Turkman, 14, and Ahmed Saqr, 15. Needless to say, Israel is not invested in the ‘protection’ of these and other Palestinian children. It is the entity that is doing the harm.

But since the UN and others within the international community are content with the issuing of statements – ‘reminding Israel’ of its responsibility, expressing ‘deep concerns’ about the situation or, in the case of Washington, even blaming Palestinians – what other options do Palestinians have, but to resist?

The rise of the Lions’ Den, the Jenin Brigades, the Nablus Brigades, and many other such groups and brigades, made mostly of poor and poorly armed Palestinian refugees, is hardly a mystery. One fights when one is oppressed, humiliated, and routinely violated. This role has governed human relations and conflicts since the very beginning.

But the rise of the Palestinians must be distressing for those who want to maintain the status quo. One is the Palestinian Authority.

The PA stands to lose much if the Palestinian revolt spreads beyond the boundaries of the northern West Bank. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who enjoys little legitimacy, will have no political role to play. Without such a role, however artificial, foreign funds will quickly dry, and the party will be over.

For Israel, the stakes are also high.

The Israeli military under the leadership of Netanyahu’s enemy, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, wants to escalate the fight against Palestinians without repeating the full-scale cities invasion of 2002. But the internal intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, is becoming keener on a full-scale crackdown.

Far-right Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich wants to exploit the violence as a pretense to expand illegal settlements. Another far-right politician, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, is searching for a civil war, led by the most violent of Jewish settlers, the very core of his political constituency.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is struggling with his own political and legal woes, is trying to give everyone a little of what they want, but all at once. The paradoxes are a recipe for chaos.

This has resulted in Gallant’s reactivation of aerial assassinations of Palestinian activists, for the first time since the Second Intifada. The first such strikes took place in the Jalameh region near Jenin on June 21.

Meanwhile, the Shin Bet is expanding its list of targets. More assassinations are surely to follow.

Concurrently, Smotrich is already planning a massive expansion of illegal settlements. And Ben Gvir is dispatching hordes of settlers to carry out pogroms in peaceful Palestinian villages. The inferno of Huwwara on February 26 was repeated in Turmus’ayya on June 21.

Though the US and its Western partners may continue to refrain from intervening in supposed ‘internal Israeli affairs’, they should carefully consider what is taking place in Palestine. This is not business as usual.

The next Intifada in Palestine will be armed, non-factional, and popular, with consequences that are too difficult to gauge.

Though for Palestinians an uprising is a cry against injustice in all its forms, for the likes of Smotrich and Ben Gvir, violence is a strategy towards settlement expansion, ethnic cleansing, and civil war. Considering the pogroms of Huwwara and Turmus’ayya, the civil war has already begun.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Continue reading →

Israeli forces invade West Bank city, killing at least 8 Palestinians

Posted on by


West Bank residents reported gunfire, drones and explosions as Israel launched extensive air and ground attacks on occupied Jenin early July 3. (Video: Reuters)

Steve Hendrix and Niha Masih, The Washington Post, July 3, 2023

JERUSALEM — About 1,000 Israeli soldiers backed by drone strikes stormed Jenin on Monday, targeting a militant “operational command center” in the most expansive Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank in two decades.

The assaults marked the start of an “extensive counterterrorism effort” centered on the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, according to Israeli officials, and were ongoing as of Monday afternoon local time. At least eight people were killed and 80 injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, with 17 in critical condition. The Israel Defense Forces said the operation would continue indefinitely.

“We’ll do it as long as it is needed; there is no timeline on this right now,” Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an IDF spokesman, told reporters. Another Palestinian was shot and killed by soldiers near the city of Ramallah while protesting the Jenin attack.

New weapons, tactics further entangle U.S. in Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Gunfire, drones and explosions were reported by Jenin residents and in videos posted on social media. Residents reported receiving text messages from Israeli numbers that warned them to stay inside for their protection. Separate messages directed at militants advised them to “surrender yourself for your safety and the safety of those around you.”