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Nayfa Mohammad Ali Ka’ana, 50 |
25 sept 2019
Israeli soldiers gather at the scene where a Palestinian was shot dead near a check point in the the West Bank city of Hebron on 3 September 2018
Images of Palestinians girls or women lying in the middle of the road with blood seeping from their heads have become “normal” since the autumn of 2015.
Women, children and men have all become victims to be added to the growing body of statistics that the global media never stops to consider when reporting on this most asymmetric of conflicts.
They are the victims of the field executions committed by the Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians — women, children and men — at the humiliating and frequently fatal military checkpoints imposed across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The tragedy of these victims does not end with the hastily-fired gunshots; the wounded and dying are left to bleed while the soldiers sip their coffee and go about their regular activities, after “neutralising” the alleged threat.
Images and videos circulated on social media demonstrate that Israeli soldiers and police officers do little to try to arrest suspected criminals; they shoot first and, maybe, ask questions later.
It is obvious from the evidence that they are too keen to pull the trigger and shoot a target who could be as young as their own children or as old as their mothers.
It is even more of a tragedy that the victim is rarely named until hours or even days later, placing major psychological pressure on the community who have no real idea if a relative or friend has been shot and killed.
Last week, on 18 September to be precise, a Palestinian woman called Nayfa Ali Ka’abna, aged 50, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. tweet
She was named officially four days after she was basically executed at the Qalandiya checkpoint, north of Jerusalem. After she was shot, she was left on the side of the road in a growing pool of blood for some time.
To understand what happened to Nayfa, it is worth looking at the growing phenomenon of field executions over the past four years.
Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun was crossing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Hebron on 22 September, 2015, when she was shot. The Israeli narrative claimed that the 18 year old did not comply with the order to stop and therefore posed a danger to the soldiers.
The young woman was in her first year of university, and was known in the local neighbourhoods for her solidarity with Palestinian families affected by settler harassment. She had to cross the checkpoints repeatedly for this purpose.
On the day of the deadly attack, two soldiers ordered her to stop and then fired at least 10 bullets at her from their automatic rifles. Hadeel fell to the ground after being hit by the first bullet, but the soldiers continued to fire at her. Most of the bullets hit her chest and upper body.
The Israeli occupation army immediately claimed, as usual, that the young woman had tried to attack the soldiers with a knife, and that the heavily-armed soldiers acted “according to protocol” as their lives were in danger. Many pictures surfaced on social media proving the Israeli claim to be false.
The reality of this heinous murder was documented by a passer-by; the two soldiers opened fire on Hadeel from a distance of 4 metres and no knife was seen. The brutality of the attack was escalated by the fact that she was left on the ground for about half an hour after being shot.
Journalist Amira Hass reported the details of the crime in Haaretz on 3 November, 2015, based on documented facts which disprove the army’s narrative.
Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun’s family took the case to court, but the Israeli judicial system ensured that the army and its soldiers were acquitted, as usually happens. The family appealed, but the result was the same.
The case was closed in February 2019, with the soldiers acquitted of all charges. This was no surprise; the so-called Israeli “Defence” Forces’ story is normally accepted as the truth without question.
The world ignored the tragedy of Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun at the time, giving the occupation authorities a tacit green light to continue the field executions on the pretext that the victims “pose a danger to the lives of soldiers”.
Killing Palestinians in this way has become a recurring fact of life protected by carefully woven justifications. However, the idea of a fruit knife held by a schoolgirl, shining from afar, actually posing a threat to the lives of a group of armed soldiers wearing body armour just doesn’t ring true.
Moreover, firing numerous bullets at a girl, woman, man or boy and at a part of the body where death is almost certain to result suggests that Israeli soldiers have little or no regard for Palestinian lives.
The official Israeli version of field executions is simply not credible. It is now a fact, though, that any Palestinian going about their lawful business can expect to be shot at random if they are on foot at a military checkpoint. Make a wrong move or display any “unusual behaviour” — a very loosely-defined term — and they can face a lethal volley of bullets.
This poses an even bigger threat to those with hearing or visual impairments, or those who do not understand the gestures or orders yelled by soldiers and police officers, not least due to the different language and means of expression.
Israel’s military checkpoints may now be rooted deeply in Palestinian life, but they remain a threat to those with mental health issues or other communication difficulties. If someone has a seizure or fit at one of these checkpoints, they could pay for it with their life.
Given the number of these incidents, the Palestinians are convinced that the occupation authorities do not hesitate to justify any field execution committed by their security forces even before any investigation can take place — if it takes place at all.
The killers are not above planting a knife next to the victims lying on the ground to “prove” their dishonest narrative.
Furthermore, even if a schoolgirl is holding a knife with the intention of attacking the fully trained and armed soldiers, why are they incapable of disarming her? Shooting her when she is well beyond arms’ reach looks like an extremely disproportionate response.
As the list of “knife-wielding attackers” shot dead grows longer, how many of their intended victims were actually killed? None whatsoever.
What is certain in all of this, is that the Israeli occupation forces are able to kill Palestinians at will, and get away with it.
The uncomfortable truth absent from the propaganda pushed out by Israel and its supporters is that the killers of dozens of indigenous Palestinian men, women and children in field executions across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in recent years are actually members of an occupation army violating international law; they don’t deserve our sympathy.
It is their victims who live — and die — under military occupation and oppression and are deserving of whatever we can do to help them. tweet
Field executions are one of the “sovereign manifestations” that the Israeli occupation forces have monopolised at their many checkpoints intended to disrupt Palestinians in their daily lives. They impede freedom of movement, cause humiliation and provide opportunities for arrest and, as we have seen, murder.
Such serious violations led a number of anti-occupation Israelis to form a human rights group a few years ago to monitor what the security forces are doing at the checkpoints. It is called Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, but the Israeli government is busy cracking down on groups like this one, claiming that they are “working against the state” and discrediting them.
Before we accept the Israeli excuses for the killing of Palestinians at the checkpoints, we must acknowledge the presence of occupation forces in the Palestinian territories; and that the deployment of heavily-armed troops to direct and disrupt everyday life poses a real and present threat to ordinary Palestinians of all ages, male and female alike.
No reasonable human being, let alone a member of a brutal occupation army and oppressive regime, can expect people who are deprived of their liberty, independence and control of their land and resources to pass around flowers to the soldiers who spend their days humiliating, torturing and killing them.
The Palestinians don’t need anyone to incite them to act against the occupation forces; Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied territories do that job perfectly well without any need for any input from anyone else.
The dozens of children and young people shot and killed by the occupation forces at checkpoints were eyewitnesses to the murder, arbitrary arrests, intimidation and humiliation of their families, friends and fellow citizens.
Ignoring the field executions that have taken place encourages the Israeli occupation soldiers to carry on shooting at will; we all appear to be immune to the sight of a Palestinian lying in a pool of blood for no apparent reason other than the ongoing Israeli propaganda about “incitement” and “knife attacks”.
Nayfeh Ka’abna was the latest in a growing line of victims like Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun whose blood was shed and allowed to flow into the gutter so callously by young men and women armed to the teeth with the latest weapons and ammunition.
These women were yet more victims of Israel and its ongoing occupation that the world does not care about.
Images of Palestinians girls or women lying in the middle of the road with blood seeping from their heads have become “normal” since the autumn of 2015.
Women, children and men have all become victims to be added to the growing body of statistics that the global media never stops to consider when reporting on this most asymmetric of conflicts.
They are the victims of the field executions committed by the Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians — women, children and men — at the humiliating and frequently fatal military checkpoints imposed across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The tragedy of these victims does not end with the hastily-fired gunshots; the wounded and dying are left to bleed while the soldiers sip their coffee and go about their regular activities, after “neutralising” the alleged threat.
Images and videos circulated on social media demonstrate that Israeli soldiers and police officers do little to try to arrest suspected criminals; they shoot first and, maybe, ask questions later.
It is obvious from the evidence that they are too keen to pull the trigger and shoot a target who could be as young as their own children or as old as their mothers.
It is even more of a tragedy that the victim is rarely named until hours or even days later, placing major psychological pressure on the community who have no real idea if a relative or friend has been shot and killed.
Last week, on 18 September to be precise, a Palestinian woman called Nayfa Ali Ka’abna, aged 50, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. tweet
She was named officially four days after she was basically executed at the Qalandiya checkpoint, north of Jerusalem. After she was shot, she was left on the side of the road in a growing pool of blood for some time.
To understand what happened to Nayfa, it is worth looking at the growing phenomenon of field executions over the past four years.
Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun was crossing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Hebron on 22 September, 2015, when she was shot. The Israeli narrative claimed that the 18 year old did not comply with the order to stop and therefore posed a danger to the soldiers.
The young woman was in her first year of university, and was known in the local neighbourhoods for her solidarity with Palestinian families affected by settler harassment. She had to cross the checkpoints repeatedly for this purpose.
On the day of the deadly attack, two soldiers ordered her to stop and then fired at least 10 bullets at her from their automatic rifles. Hadeel fell to the ground after being hit by the first bullet, but the soldiers continued to fire at her. Most of the bullets hit her chest and upper body.
The Israeli occupation army immediately claimed, as usual, that the young woman had tried to attack the soldiers with a knife, and that the heavily-armed soldiers acted “according to protocol” as their lives were in danger. Many pictures surfaced on social media proving the Israeli claim to be false.
The reality of this heinous murder was documented by a passer-by; the two soldiers opened fire on Hadeel from a distance of 4 metres and no knife was seen. The brutality of the attack was escalated by the fact that she was left on the ground for about half an hour after being shot.
Journalist Amira Hass reported the details of the crime in Haaretz on 3 November, 2015, based on documented facts which disprove the army’s narrative.
Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun’s family took the case to court, but the Israeli judicial system ensured that the army and its soldiers were acquitted, as usually happens. The family appealed, but the result was the same.
The case was closed in February 2019, with the soldiers acquitted of all charges. This was no surprise; the so-called Israeli “Defence” Forces’ story is normally accepted as the truth without question.
The world ignored the tragedy of Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun at the time, giving the occupation authorities a tacit green light to continue the field executions on the pretext that the victims “pose a danger to the lives of soldiers”.
Killing Palestinians in this way has become a recurring fact of life protected by carefully woven justifications. However, the idea of a fruit knife held by a schoolgirl, shining from afar, actually posing a threat to the lives of a group of armed soldiers wearing body armour just doesn’t ring true.
Moreover, firing numerous bullets at a girl, woman, man or boy and at a part of the body where death is almost certain to result suggests that Israeli soldiers have little or no regard for Palestinian lives.
The official Israeli version of field executions is simply not credible. It is now a fact, though, that any Palestinian going about their lawful business can expect to be shot at random if they are on foot at a military checkpoint. Make a wrong move or display any “unusual behaviour” — a very loosely-defined term — and they can face a lethal volley of bullets.
This poses an even bigger threat to those with hearing or visual impairments, or those who do not understand the gestures or orders yelled by soldiers and police officers, not least due to the different language and means of expression.
Israel’s military checkpoints may now be rooted deeply in Palestinian life, but they remain a threat to those with mental health issues or other communication difficulties. If someone has a seizure or fit at one of these checkpoints, they could pay for it with their life.
Given the number of these incidents, the Palestinians are convinced that the occupation authorities do not hesitate to justify any field execution committed by their security forces even before any investigation can take place — if it takes place at all.
The killers are not above planting a knife next to the victims lying on the ground to “prove” their dishonest narrative.
Furthermore, even if a schoolgirl is holding a knife with the intention of attacking the fully trained and armed soldiers, why are they incapable of disarming her? Shooting her when she is well beyond arms’ reach looks like an extremely disproportionate response.
As the list of “knife-wielding attackers” shot dead grows longer, how many of their intended victims were actually killed? None whatsoever.
What is certain in all of this, is that the Israeli occupation forces are able to kill Palestinians at will, and get away with it.
The uncomfortable truth absent from the propaganda pushed out by Israel and its supporters is that the killers of dozens of indigenous Palestinian men, women and children in field executions across the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in recent years are actually members of an occupation army violating international law; they don’t deserve our sympathy.
It is their victims who live — and die — under military occupation and oppression and are deserving of whatever we can do to help them. tweet
Field executions are one of the “sovereign manifestations” that the Israeli occupation forces have monopolised at their many checkpoints intended to disrupt Palestinians in their daily lives. They impede freedom of movement, cause humiliation and provide opportunities for arrest and, as we have seen, murder.
Such serious violations led a number of anti-occupation Israelis to form a human rights group a few years ago to monitor what the security forces are doing at the checkpoints. It is called Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch, but the Israeli government is busy cracking down on groups like this one, claiming that they are “working against the state” and discrediting them.
Before we accept the Israeli excuses for the killing of Palestinians at the checkpoints, we must acknowledge the presence of occupation forces in the Palestinian territories; and that the deployment of heavily-armed troops to direct and disrupt everyday life poses a real and present threat to ordinary Palestinians of all ages, male and female alike.
No reasonable human being, let alone a member of a brutal occupation army and oppressive regime, can expect people who are deprived of their liberty, independence and control of their land and resources to pass around flowers to the soldiers who spend their days humiliating, torturing and killing them.
The Palestinians don’t need anyone to incite them to act against the occupation forces; Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied territories do that job perfectly well without any need for any input from anyone else.
The dozens of children and young people shot and killed by the occupation forces at checkpoints were eyewitnesses to the murder, arbitrary arrests, intimidation and humiliation of their families, friends and fellow citizens.
Ignoring the field executions that have taken place encourages the Israeli occupation soldiers to carry on shooting at will; we all appear to be immune to the sight of a Palestinian lying in a pool of blood for no apparent reason other than the ongoing Israeli propaganda about “incitement” and “knife attacks”.
Nayfeh Ka’abna was the latest in a growing line of victims like Hadeel Al-Hashlamoun whose blood was shed and allowed to flow into the gutter so callously by young men and women armed to the teeth with the latest weapons and ammunition.
These women were yet more victims of Israel and its ongoing occupation that the world does not care about.
22 sept 2019
Nayfa Mohammad Ali Ka’ana, 50
The wounded Palestinian woman, who was shot by the soldiers, on Wednesday, September 18th, after an alleged stabbing attempt at Qalandia Terminal, north of occupied Jerusalem, has been officially identified, Son Sunday evening, as Nayfa Mohammad Ali Ka’ana, 50.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank has confirmed the identity of the slain woman and added that Ka’abna was from al-Mo’arrajat Bedouin community, near Taybeh Palestinian village, northeast of the central West Bank city of Ramallah.
After she was shot, she was left bleeding for a long time, before an Israeli ambulance moved her to Hadassah Israeli Medical Center in Jerusalem, where she succumbed to her wounds.
Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the soldiers saw the woman and ordered her to stop, “but she did not heed to their commands, and pulled out a knife before the soldiers shot her.
Following the incident, the soldiers closed the terminal and maced many Palestinians with pepper-spray while trying to remove them from the area.
Israel did not release her name, and her identity was mistaken with another Palestinian woman, however, on Sunday evening, the Israeli “District Coordination Office” officially informed ist Palestinian counterpart in the West Bank of her identity.
The woman’s corpse is still with the Israeli side.
The wounded Palestinian woman, who was shot by the soldiers, on Wednesday, September 18th, after an alleged stabbing attempt at Qalandia Terminal, north of occupied Jerusalem, has been officially identified, Son Sunday evening, as Nayfa Mohammad Ali Ka’ana, 50.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank has confirmed the identity of the slain woman and added that Ka’abna was from al-Mo’arrajat Bedouin community, near Taybeh Palestinian village, northeast of the central West Bank city of Ramallah.
After she was shot, she was left bleeding for a long time, before an Israeli ambulance moved her to Hadassah Israeli Medical Center in Jerusalem, where she succumbed to her wounds.
Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the soldiers saw the woman and ordered her to stop, “but she did not heed to their commands, and pulled out a knife before the soldiers shot her.
Following the incident, the soldiers closed the terminal and maced many Palestinians with pepper-spray while trying to remove them from the area.
Israel did not release her name, and her identity was mistaken with another Palestinian woman, however, on Sunday evening, the Israeli “District Coordination Office” officially informed ist Palestinian counterpart in the West Bank of her identity.
The woman’s corpse is still with the Israeli side.
21 sept 2019
By Jeremy Salt
The most important news coming out of occupied Palestine last week was not the blow delivered to Benyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu or Gantz, it will be business as usual, now that the elections are over: more attacks on Gaza, possibly a large-scale war on Gaza, possibly a war on Lebanon, or Iran, who would know, as Israel always has a profusion of targets.
No, the most important news was not the elections but the killing of a Palestinian woman in the West Bank, only a few days after a 10-year-old boy, Abd al Rahman Yasir Shtewi, had been shot in the head by a soldier near the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum during a demonstration over the closure of an access road. He was taken to hospital in critical condition.
The woman, Alaa Wahdan, was shot with an assault rifle as she walked towards a checkpoint near the Qalandiya refugee camp, built for refugees after the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in 1948.
She was walking on the road, having missed the pedestrian lane allotted to the Palestinians. That was the crime for which she had to die. She was told to stop. According to the five heavily armed men who blocked her way, she pulled out a knife, a small yellow-handled thing photographed lying on the road. Alaa was five to seven meters away and the knife could have been knocked away with the butt of a gun but one of the armed men shot her instead, the bullet apparently severing an artery in her leg.
Alaa fell to the road and was left there unattended for half an hour, bleeding to death. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it was prevented from attending to her. The soldiers watched her drag herself along the roadside on her front, the blood pouring out of her body, leaving a long, wide red stain behind her. Not one of them made any attempt to comfort her or staunch the wound. They watched her bleed to death. They let her die, in line with unstated state policy.
Who Alaa was precisely, a mother, a sister, a daughter or an aunt, was of no interest to the occupiers. She was a down-page story in the media, not even worthy of being given a name, no more than the African ‘terrorists’ of the 1940s or 50s were worthy of being given a name by the British or French occupiers of their land who tortured and murdered them. In the words of Mickey Rosenfeld, the police gauleiter of occupied Jerusalem, she was no more than a “female terrorist” who was “injured moderately.” If this is so, Mr Rosenfeld, why did she die?
In the background, while Alaa crawled along the road, her lifeblood draining away, the spivs, the thieves and the war criminals quarreled over who should be next to take over the occupation of Palestine. The choice was between Netanyahu and Gantz, the outcome of the elections so close that the ‘kingmaker’ will be Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan immigrant who arrived in Palestine when he was 20 and lives with his wife and children on Palestinian land in the settlement of Nokdim.
Like Menahim Begin in the 1970s, Lieberman was once regarded as a thug and fanatic who would never make it into the mainstream of Zionist politics but as the mainstream has shifted further right year by year it finally reached him. He once advocated the bombing of the Aswan dam as a means of shutting up the Egyptians. He thinks the ‘Arab’ members of the Zionist ‘parliament’ are the allies of terrorists.
He wants Muslim and Christian Palestinians to be required to swear an oath of loyalty to a state which has declared itself to be a Jewish, which has practically stripped them bare of all they possess and which plans to keep going until nothing is left.
His philosophy can be summed up in his own words: “Whoever is against us there’s nothing to do …. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head … otherwise we won’t be here.” The option of handing back part of what has been stolen as a means of making peace is not even within his realm of thinking.
As for Netanyahu, his campaigning was nakedly racist. He warned against an ‘Arab’ party ending up in government and his Likud party stationed cameras outside polling booths to intimidate Palestinians and prevent them from voting. It didn’t work. They turned out in higher numbers than ever. It is the measure of this individual’s vile nature that he wanted to attack Gaza either to win or postpone the elections, riding to eventual victory over the bodies of more dead Palestinian men, women and children.
Gantz got in his way, but only for the same electoral reason, because he also is a killer of Palestinians, and currently the subject of prosecution in the Netherlands for the bombing of an apartment building in Gaza in 2014 which killed six members of the same family.
As the Palestinians well know, it makes no difference which of the parties is in power because their policies – more war, more killing, more settlements, with annexation now only a few steps away – are all the same.
The pathology of the Zionists puts them beyond reason. They do not connect up with any laws or values except their own and trying to reason with them on the basis of international law and universal values is a waste of time, pebbles thrown against the side of a tank.
In 2013 Mehdi Hassan interviewed Dani Dayon as the centerpiece of an Oxford Union debate. Until recently Dayon was the head of the Yesha settler council. Sitting in the front row, Ghada Karmi, born in Al Quds to a family that owns land on the West Bank taken over by foreign settlers like Dayon, had to endure the lies and delusions that flowed from this man’s mouth. Cutting through the arrogance and his smiling, self-assured attempts to deceive the audience, she told him what he actually was in her eyes and the eyes of the world – a common thief.
There is no mystery about what has ‘happened’ in Palestine. There is no ‘conflict of rights,’ ‘contested narratives’ or ‘disputed’ ownership. These are all propaganda phrases designed to conceal the indisputable reality. From the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, Palestine has been stolen by people whose moral right to stay there can only be conferred on them by the people whose land they have stolen.
Had they ever accepted this principle, had they ever apologized for their crimes, had they agreed to share instead of wanting to take the lot, using all the brutal means at their disposal, this moral right could have been secured but they forfeited this possibility long ago, preferring endless war to the possibility of peace. There is no ‘two state’ solution in sight. Add it to the list of myths still being purveyed. There is no solution in sight at all, at least not one based on rational discussion and the application of international.
There is no statute of limitations here. The land was stolen and will remain stolen no matter how long the Zionists hold it. There is no ‘land of Israel’. There is no ‘Temple Mount’ and no ‘tomb of the patriarchs’ in Hebron. These are all deceptions sitting atop a mountain of lies intended to bury the truth.
There is Palestine, there is the Haram al Sharif, the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, where the settler state pogrom against the Palestinians continues without pause, and countless other sites on the map, all of them occupied and renamed. Not a drop of water in the sea or a speck of sand on the beach belongs to the Zionists. It has all been stolen.
As soon as the elections were over, ‘kingmaker’ Lieberman, leading the party of Russian ‘immigrants’ to an illegally occupied land, started stitching together a ‘national unity’ government. As excited or as preoccupied with the process as the Zionist population of Palestine might be, there is no prospect of change for the Palestinians except change for the worse.
Gantz is as much a warmonger as Netanyahu or Lieberman and as the Palestinians will continue to resist occupation of their land where and when they can, as is their natural right and their right under international law, more large-scale violence is only a matter of time. In their arrogance the Zionists are ignoring all the warning signs, the cries of ‘death to Israel’ from the Houthis, the tens of thousands of missiles in Hizbullah’s armory and the determination of Iran to defend itself and its allies.
The Zionists can kick the Palestinians around, but not these powerful enemies, who have behind them the support for Palestine of Muslims everywhere, not to speak of the numerous defenders of Palestine and Palestinian rights in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and many other countries.
The Zionists came to the Middle East as a ‘rampart’ of ‘western civilisation’ and that is where they have remained, on the ramparts, behind the palisades, the fences and the wall, fencing others out and fencing themselves in. They wanted to be in the Middle East but not of the Middle East. It was beneath them. They hijacked those aspects of its culture that suited them but looked down with contempt on the rest and they still do.
In any case, western domination was the accurate phrase, not western civilization. The ‘west’ has never been civilized, not in the Middle East or in any other lands against which it went to war and occupied. Rather, it has been utterly barbaric, as the word is generally understood, and Zionism has been part of that barbarism.
Not wanting to be part of the Middle East except on its own unacceptable terms, Zionism has to rely on powerful outside backers, a role currently filled by one of them, the United States. However, will it always be there to give the Zionist state the support it demands, will it always be capable of giving it the support it demands, will it ultimately be willing to put its own life on the line for a small state far away that is held in contempt by much of the world, not for bad reasons but for perfectly understandable ones, and one that is held in contempt as well by an increasing number of Americans?
Only arrogance could be the reason for the willingness of the Zionists to stake their future on such uncertainties, when for a small price, except in their own greedy eyes, they could have secured their place in the Middle East long ago. There is one other reason for their confidence, though, and that is their possession of nuclear weapons. At the worst, backs finally against the wall, they can take everyone down with them.
Take a serial killer out of the psychiatric ward, hand him a machine-gun and wait to see what happens. That is the prospect ahead of the Middle East as long as the Zionist state remains a killer at large.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The most important news coming out of occupied Palestine last week was not the blow delivered to Benyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu or Gantz, it will be business as usual, now that the elections are over: more attacks on Gaza, possibly a large-scale war on Gaza, possibly a war on Lebanon, or Iran, who would know, as Israel always has a profusion of targets.
No, the most important news was not the elections but the killing of a Palestinian woman in the West Bank, only a few days after a 10-year-old boy, Abd al Rahman Yasir Shtewi, had been shot in the head by a soldier near the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum during a demonstration over the closure of an access road. He was taken to hospital in critical condition.
The woman, Alaa Wahdan, was shot with an assault rifle as she walked towards a checkpoint near the Qalandiya refugee camp, built for refugees after the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle in 1948.
She was walking on the road, having missed the pedestrian lane allotted to the Palestinians. That was the crime for which she had to die. She was told to stop. According to the five heavily armed men who blocked her way, she pulled out a knife, a small yellow-handled thing photographed lying on the road. Alaa was five to seven meters away and the knife could have been knocked away with the butt of a gun but one of the armed men shot her instead, the bullet apparently severing an artery in her leg.
Alaa fell to the road and was left there unattended for half an hour, bleeding to death. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it was prevented from attending to her. The soldiers watched her drag herself along the roadside on her front, the blood pouring out of her body, leaving a long, wide red stain behind her. Not one of them made any attempt to comfort her or staunch the wound. They watched her bleed to death. They let her die, in line with unstated state policy.
Who Alaa was precisely, a mother, a sister, a daughter or an aunt, was of no interest to the occupiers. She was a down-page story in the media, not even worthy of being given a name, no more than the African ‘terrorists’ of the 1940s or 50s were worthy of being given a name by the British or French occupiers of their land who tortured and murdered them. In the words of Mickey Rosenfeld, the police gauleiter of occupied Jerusalem, she was no more than a “female terrorist” who was “injured moderately.” If this is so, Mr Rosenfeld, why did she die?
In the background, while Alaa crawled along the road, her lifeblood draining away, the spivs, the thieves and the war criminals quarreled over who should be next to take over the occupation of Palestine. The choice was between Netanyahu and Gantz, the outcome of the elections so close that the ‘kingmaker’ will be Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan immigrant who arrived in Palestine when he was 20 and lives with his wife and children on Palestinian land in the settlement of Nokdim.
Like Menahim Begin in the 1970s, Lieberman was once regarded as a thug and fanatic who would never make it into the mainstream of Zionist politics but as the mainstream has shifted further right year by year it finally reached him. He once advocated the bombing of the Aswan dam as a means of shutting up the Egyptians. He thinks the ‘Arab’ members of the Zionist ‘parliament’ are the allies of terrorists.
He wants Muslim and Christian Palestinians to be required to swear an oath of loyalty to a state which has declared itself to be a Jewish, which has practically stripped them bare of all they possess and which plans to keep going until nothing is left.
His philosophy can be summed up in his own words: “Whoever is against us there’s nothing to do …. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head … otherwise we won’t be here.” The option of handing back part of what has been stolen as a means of making peace is not even within his realm of thinking.
As for Netanyahu, his campaigning was nakedly racist. He warned against an ‘Arab’ party ending up in government and his Likud party stationed cameras outside polling booths to intimidate Palestinians and prevent them from voting. It didn’t work. They turned out in higher numbers than ever. It is the measure of this individual’s vile nature that he wanted to attack Gaza either to win or postpone the elections, riding to eventual victory over the bodies of more dead Palestinian men, women and children.
Gantz got in his way, but only for the same electoral reason, because he also is a killer of Palestinians, and currently the subject of prosecution in the Netherlands for the bombing of an apartment building in Gaza in 2014 which killed six members of the same family.
As the Palestinians well know, it makes no difference which of the parties is in power because their policies – more war, more killing, more settlements, with annexation now only a few steps away – are all the same.
The pathology of the Zionists puts them beyond reason. They do not connect up with any laws or values except their own and trying to reason with them on the basis of international law and universal values is a waste of time, pebbles thrown against the side of a tank.
In 2013 Mehdi Hassan interviewed Dani Dayon as the centerpiece of an Oxford Union debate. Until recently Dayon was the head of the Yesha settler council. Sitting in the front row, Ghada Karmi, born in Al Quds to a family that owns land on the West Bank taken over by foreign settlers like Dayon, had to endure the lies and delusions that flowed from this man’s mouth. Cutting through the arrogance and his smiling, self-assured attempts to deceive the audience, she told him what he actually was in her eyes and the eyes of the world – a common thief.
There is no mystery about what has ‘happened’ in Palestine. There is no ‘conflict of rights,’ ‘contested narratives’ or ‘disputed’ ownership. These are all propaganda phrases designed to conceal the indisputable reality. From the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, Palestine has been stolen by people whose moral right to stay there can only be conferred on them by the people whose land they have stolen.
Had they ever accepted this principle, had they ever apologized for their crimes, had they agreed to share instead of wanting to take the lot, using all the brutal means at their disposal, this moral right could have been secured but they forfeited this possibility long ago, preferring endless war to the possibility of peace. There is no ‘two state’ solution in sight. Add it to the list of myths still being purveyed. There is no solution in sight at all, at least not one based on rational discussion and the application of international.
There is no statute of limitations here. The land was stolen and will remain stolen no matter how long the Zionists hold it. There is no ‘land of Israel’. There is no ‘Temple Mount’ and no ‘tomb of the patriarchs’ in Hebron. These are all deceptions sitting atop a mountain of lies intended to bury the truth.
There is Palestine, there is the Haram al Sharif, the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, where the settler state pogrom against the Palestinians continues without pause, and countless other sites on the map, all of them occupied and renamed. Not a drop of water in the sea or a speck of sand on the beach belongs to the Zionists. It has all been stolen.
As soon as the elections were over, ‘kingmaker’ Lieberman, leading the party of Russian ‘immigrants’ to an illegally occupied land, started stitching together a ‘national unity’ government. As excited or as preoccupied with the process as the Zionist population of Palestine might be, there is no prospect of change for the Palestinians except change for the worse.
Gantz is as much a warmonger as Netanyahu or Lieberman and as the Palestinians will continue to resist occupation of their land where and when they can, as is their natural right and their right under international law, more large-scale violence is only a matter of time. In their arrogance the Zionists are ignoring all the warning signs, the cries of ‘death to Israel’ from the Houthis, the tens of thousands of missiles in Hizbullah’s armory and the determination of Iran to defend itself and its allies.
The Zionists can kick the Palestinians around, but not these powerful enemies, who have behind them the support for Palestine of Muslims everywhere, not to speak of the numerous defenders of Palestine and Palestinian rights in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and many other countries.
The Zionists came to the Middle East as a ‘rampart’ of ‘western civilisation’ and that is where they have remained, on the ramparts, behind the palisades, the fences and the wall, fencing others out and fencing themselves in. They wanted to be in the Middle East but not of the Middle East. It was beneath them. They hijacked those aspects of its culture that suited them but looked down with contempt on the rest and they still do.
In any case, western domination was the accurate phrase, not western civilization. The ‘west’ has never been civilized, not in the Middle East or in any other lands against which it went to war and occupied. Rather, it has been utterly barbaric, as the word is generally understood, and Zionism has been part of that barbarism.
Not wanting to be part of the Middle East except on its own unacceptable terms, Zionism has to rely on powerful outside backers, a role currently filled by one of them, the United States. However, will it always be there to give the Zionist state the support it demands, will it always be capable of giving it the support it demands, will it ultimately be willing to put its own life on the line for a small state far away that is held in contempt by much of the world, not for bad reasons but for perfectly understandable ones, and one that is held in contempt as well by an increasing number of Americans?
Only arrogance could be the reason for the willingness of the Zionists to stake their future on such uncertainties, when for a small price, except in their own greedy eyes, they could have secured their place in the Middle East long ago. There is one other reason for their confidence, though, and that is their possession of nuclear weapons. At the worst, backs finally against the wall, they can take everyone down with them.
Take a serial killer out of the psychiatric ward, hand him a machine-gun and wait to see what happens. That is the prospect ahead of the Middle East as long as the Zionist state remains a killer at large.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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