Daily Times

Symbolically, expressing concern for the unthinkable Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians seems a fait accompli to the rest of the international community, including the Muslim Ummah, who remains helpless in countering an iniquitous Israeli agenda. Current events in occupied East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip strongly endorse that Israel is constantly practicing a policy of repression/ military brinkmanship in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Democrat US lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has called Israel an apartheid state. In a recent tweet, she said, ‘’If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? “She added: “Apartheid states aren’t democracies.”

For years on end, Israel has been engaged in a war of extermination against the Palestinians. Israel has been using lethal force against non-violent Palestinian demonstrations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies accompanied by his evil trajectories since 2007 have had grossly undermined any scope of peaceful negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, thereby intermittently stalling the Middle East peace process.

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — from David Ben Gurion to Netanyahu — endorses one glaring truth: The more land Israel illegally seized by military means and the more Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland, the more Israeli leaders felt the pressing need to erase Palestinians from the annals of history as a people with an identity, a culture, and an entitlement to nationhood.

Attempts to forcefully evict indigenous Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood is part of a pre-planned design by Israel to alter the demographic make-up of occupied East Jerusalem — one house at a time — in violation of international law

Veritably, all the successive Israeli governments from David Ben Gurion to Netanyahu have been using the tactical narratives of victimhood/ state security to justify their violent and often pre-emptive acts against the Palestinians. By contrast, the Palestinian narratives of victimhood —draw on the injustice enshrined in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that began to be implemented before and during the British Mandate of 1923 and since the 1947 UN partition plan — remains an undeniable truth of history. These sentiments of the Palestinian plights continue to this day.

In their ulterior pursuit to create a Jewish state of Israel in 1948, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.

By dint of its Six- Day War in June 1967, Israel brought more than one million Palestinians under its direct control in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. The 1967 war turned Israel into the country with the largest Palestinian population. From 1967 until the present, it has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, albeit partly excluding East Jerusalem.

Moreover, forcible takeovers of Palestinian homes, brutal suppression of demonstrators, places of worship under assault, identity-based communal violence, indiscriminate rocket attacks, and children killed in strikes, seemingly all these evil acts speak about unlawful use of force accompanied by a discriminatory treatment — with the exact opposite legal outcomes for claims of pre-1948 title to the property based on whether the claimant is a Jewish Israeli or a Palestinian — underscores the reality of apartheid that Palestinians face today.

Although the Oslo Accord (1993) entailed a piecemeal process by which a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be treated as one political entity, there has been a fragmentation of the Palestinian territories into small parcels and their isolation from other Palestinian population centres. New policies increased the geographic difficulties of convening meetings, networking, and staging public protests. A grid of bypass roads bisects the territories, linking the Jewish settlements to Israel, but insulating them from the surrounding Palestinian population.

And yet, this division has been further aggravated by the so- called Israeli barricade, actually an apartheid wall or the wall of segregation — constructed by Israeli authorities in 2003 — snaking around East Jerusalem, including illegal Jewish neighbourhoods and leaving out the majority of Palestinian neighbourhoods. More than 140,000 Palestinians are ruthlessly left out of the city’s boundaries, while illegal settlements have been included to ensure Jewish supremacy over the city. “International law is very clear: annexation and territorial conquest are forbidden by the Charter of the United Nations,” said Michael Lynk, the UN independent expert on human rights in the Palestinian territories.

And above all, the controversial 2018 nation-state bill — which reaffirms the Jewish character of the state legalises discriminatory policies against Palestinian citizens — is a clear manifestation of a racist law. The current move to evict Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem is seen as an attempt to forcibly expand Israeli settlements in the Arab neighbourhoods of the Old City. The attempt by Israeli forces, working alongside Israeli settlers, to forcefully evict indigenous Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood is part of a pre-planned design by Israel to alter the demographic make-up of occupied East Jerusalem — one house at a time — in violation of international law.

Pitiably, the wounds of the Palestinian plight of forced evictions and displacement are very deep — vindicated by the fact when the state has run out of homes to bulldoze for lack of permits and the settlers fully conquer East Jerusalem, with the nation-state law in place and the Supreme Court silent, what happens to the Palestinians who remain wanderers in their own land? What happens to those hapless Palestinians who proclaim, These are our legal homes, and we will not go? Yes for sure, the Israeli authorities have no answers to these pertinent questions.

The latest altercations in Jerusalem brought these to a head, and found common resonance throughout Palestine’s geographically scattered communities, including in the Palestinian diaspora. Israeli authorities must immediately scrap planned forced evictions, said Saleh Higazi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

While the wars of 2006, 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 were all focused on Gaza, the new round of fighting, including in Gaza, has reaffirmed the centrality of Jerusalem in the conflict. In the current conflict, more than 300 people in Gaza, some of them children, have been killed as Israel continued strikes on the Palestinian enclave. Another 1,400 Palestinians have been wounded in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces. Meanwhile, the Israeli military’s latest strikes in the Gaza Strip have done enormous collateral damage to buildings and civil infrastructure, bringing down several apartments and office towers and levelling government buildings, service facilities such as schools and banks, homes and security compounds, including several police stations.

(To be continued)

The writer is an independent ‘IR’ researcher and international law analyst based in Pakistan