This week's postings at JfJfP.com
This week, July 27-August 2, 2015 , the postings happen to consist of one story after another of violence inflicted by the Israeli state, Knesset, settlers, religious right-wingers on Palestinians.
Supreme court, civil administration, Israeli state all agree that the Palestinian village of Susya must be demolished. Despite pouring rain JfJfP and the Jewish Socialists’ Group held a protest outside the Israeli embassy in west London.
Saving Susya in the rain
Shock and fury at the arson attack by settlers on two houses in Kafr Duma, near Nablus, which incinerated 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha (only ashes remained) and inflicted serious burns on four other family members swept through Israel and the oPt.
Settler thugs set fire to Palestinian family, baby dies
In subsequent protests in Gaza and the West Bank two young Palestinians were shot dead by security forces. It makes a sick joke of PM Netanyahu’s insistence that heavy repression over Palestinians must be maintained because the security of Israel and Israelis is at stake.
Who is it who is dying in Israel / Palestine?
The shooting is done by Israeli security forces, police and IDF. But the role of right-wing extremists – often, but not always, religious settlers – in trying to provoke Palestinians into violent resistance is very obvious. Protected for years by the state, and tolerated by Israeli society, it may be too late to try to rein them in. The provocation includes entering the Haram al-Sharif compound to ‘pray’.
Right wing again try to provoke a riot
It has unhinged many zealots, one of whom stabbed six Israelis at a gay pride march in Jerusalem. Particularly deplorable wrote Dr.Samuel Lebens because such violent acts are presented as ‘holy’ or an ‘aberration’, neither of which is true.
Orthodox stabber not ‘an aberration’
Bizarrely, writes Amira Hass, the same Israeli right, accepts it is the ‘Goliath’ of biblical myth, but only as long as we understand Goliath was the victim and has the right to fight back. Again, who is being killed here?
Israel rewrites Bible: Goliath fights back
Meanwhile, the influential Khader Adnan, frequently arrested, frequently on hunger strike, makes the point in an Al Jazeera interview: the hunger strike is a form of non-violent resistance which, he believes, will win in the end.
Our unarmed resistance can defeat the bullet
In order to defeat him, the Knesset has made a new law:
Knesset approves torture of force feeding
The ‘oppression and dystopian existence inflicted on the Palestinians’ made Jennifer Langer profoundly uncomfortable as a Jew, but nonetheless something she wants to bear witness to. She writes our Signatories’ blog:
Loss, memory, utopia: the refugee experience
(If you are a JfJfP signatoiry and have something you want to describe, comment on, review, argue about, send it to postings@jfjfp.org)
The frustration and anger felt by other governments about Israel’s continued expansion of settlements means polite diplomacy is no longer thought to produce any result:
UK foreign minister reprimands Israel over settlements
It appears that the pro-settlement hard line which Jewish Home wants the government to take is splitting the coalition:
Torn between settlers and world opinion
Obama may have retrospectively earned his Nobel Peace Prize by his insistence on collective diplomacy – to the fury of the Israeli and Republican right – but Netanyahu is effectively the only national leader in the West who thinks violence is the answer:
‘Jerusalem is more isolated than ever before’
And more besides.