Our Wednesday News Analysis | Six major developments that shaped 2022 for Palestinians

Palestinians have continued to resist the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, but near-daily raids have led to the deadliest year for Palestinians in the territory since 2006 [File: Mussa Qawasma/Reuters]

Source: Al Jazeera

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/26/six-major-developments-that-shaped-2022-for-palestinians

By Zena Al Tahhan and Maram Humaid
Published December 26, 2022

The UN called 2022 the deadliest year for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 16 years. Here are some of the year’s most important events.

“Disturbing evidence of Israeli forces frequently facilitating, supporting and participating in settler attacks, makes it difficult to discern between Israeli settler and state violence,” UN officials said in a statement on December 15.

“2022 is the sixth year of consecutive annual increase in the number of Israeli settler attacks in the occupied West Bank,” the statement continued. “Armed and masked Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in their homes, attacking children on their way to school, destroying property and burning olive groves, and terrorizing entire communities with complete impunity.”

Between 600,000 and 750,000 Israeli settlers live in at least 250 illegal settlements scattered across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Ramallah, Occupied West Bank and Gaza City – Conflict, raids, and the killing of one of Palestine’s most well-respected journalists – just some of the most important events to happen in Israel and Palestine in 2022.

The United Nations declared the year the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2006, evidence of increased use of force by Israel, amid a further shift to the far right in the country.

Here are six major developments that shaped 2022 for Palestinians...

Read more: Six major developments that shaped 2022 for Palestinians

WHAT IS THE NARRATIVE: DECOUPLING PALESTINE FROM ZIONISM

A protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people. (Photo: Socialist Appeal, via Wikimedia Commons)

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/what-is-the-narrative-decoupling-palestine-from-zionism/

By Blake Alcott
Published December 24, 2022

Arguing for all the rights of all the Palestinians with friends and newspaper editors in Western Europe, I’ve had some success by taking a radically Palestine-centered approach that disconnects the Palestine question from the Jewish question. What is this narrative and what are its advantages?

It’s About Palestine

It is easy to uphold the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. After Britain and France divided Greater Syria into northern and southern areas, with Britain taking over the southern part, the millennia-long indigenous inhabitants of Palestine were denied self-determination. Taking Palestine as a colony, disguised as a ‘mandate’, meant no normal sovereignty for the actual inhabitants – most of them Ottoman citizens, from now on other-determined.

In the logic of the matter, this loss of self-determination would have been the same had the ‘Mandatory’ been France, Italy, the US, Türkiye or anybody else. Like all other colonized and ‘mandated’ people, the Palestinians had a battle against colonization on their hands – whoever the military-colonial power was.

That Britain took over with the selfless goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was a secondary fact facing the Palestinians as of 1917. Whatever the motives for denying independence and democracy in any particular case, the job was to get freedom – like Syrians, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and others all over the world.

This is to say that the Zionist project was not logically central to the Britain-Palestine colonial set-up. The U.K. could have done the deed on behalf of Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, or any other nation-seeking ethnic group, or on behalf of their own people, or maybe their own criminals, as had been the case in Australia.

And sure enough, the historical documents of the 30-year argument between the Palestinians and Colonial Britain show that the reaction of the Palestinians was always: ‘Jews? We’ve lived with Jews peaceably for millennia. It’s Britain (to be sure with its European-Zionist plan) whom we are fighting.’

In other words, Britain’s making itself the tool of a non-British nationalist settler movement altered the Palestinians’ problem only slightly. Their main demand stayed: for independence, from whomever, as their natural right – and by the way, as promised them by Britain and France during the years 1915-1918 and by the League of Nations Covenant in 1920. In line with the anti-colonial spirit of Wilsonian times, collective enslavement, as such, was their main beef. That it was their false friend Britain that was doing it, or that Britain was doing it for the sake of Zionism, were ancillary.

Thus Zionism (and ipso facto Jews and Judaism) – and even Britain – are just details of the story. They are ‘accidents’ in an Aristotelian sense, not the essence of the conflict. This means that the entire Palestinian case can be framed and argued without any mention whatsoever of Zionism, Jews, or Judaism, or even Britain and the League of Nations...

Read more: What is the Narrative: Decoupling Palestine from Zionism

OPINION | AS CRIMES OF APARTHEID WORSEN, THE WEST’S EXCEPTIONALISM TOWARD ISRAEL MUST END

Palestinians cross into Israel from the West Bank through an opening in the Israeli separation barrier between the West Bank town of Qalqilya and the Israeli Kibbutz Eyal, in February.Credit: Oded Balilty/AP

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-12-21/ty-article-opinion/.premium/as-crimes-of-apartheid-worsen-the-wests-exceptionalism-towards-israel-must-end/00000185-353f-de19-a3fd-b5bffce40000

By Michael Sfard
Published December 21, 2022

Israel's new administration will be one that does not conceal its intention to preserve and further entrench the apartheid tyranny over the Palestinians, while fully cultivating Jewish supremacy as a political and legal credo

"That is why this is Europe’s moment of truth. Second only to the American administration, Europe is the chief enabler of Israel’s criminal policy toward the Palestinians.

If Europe gives Israel an umbrella of support, if it opposes and even abstains from allowing international legal institutions from addressing Israel’s policy and actions, it will not only damage its own credibility but also send an extremely dangerous message to the fledgling Israeli government in Jerusalem and the emerging administration of the occupied Palestinian territories in Tel Aviv.

They must know there is a price to pay for violating international law."

Inside Israel’s Defense Ministry, a new governing body is taking shape for the occupied Palestinian territories, which will see MK Bezalel Smotrich as its designated governor. Smotrich, a religious Zionist extremist who has spewed racist and homophobic rhetoric in the past, is pursuing a plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, without granting citizenship to the millions of Palestinians living there.

In the coalition agreements he has recently signed with designated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Smotrich made sure that every single authority over civilian affairs that has been accrued by the military and the defense minister who helms it over the course of Israel's 55-year-long occupation will be transferred to the fully equipped headquarters he is building for himself within the ministry's Tel Aviv headquarters.

Smotrich (or the minister he appoints) will have the authority to approve master plans in the settlements, order the demolition of structures built without a permit in Palestinian communities and enforce (or, more likely, refrain from enforcing) planning and construction laws on settlers. He will determine whether and where to build roads. He will decide who and what enters and exits Gaza, and he will decree whom among the Palestinians will be allowed to cross the separation fence to cultivate their lands on the other side or to work in Israel. Oh, and he will also dictate which foreign nationals may visit the West Bank.

The West Bank’s new ruler has also made sure the legal department for the territories is transferred from the military system to his headquarters, meaning that its legal advisors would be civilians, selected by Smotrich, rather than military personnel. This is a dramatic development; as civil servants, they will be formally obligated to promote the interests of the citizens of Israel, not those of the occupied Palestinians, which international laws on military occupation compel it to consider.

Read more: Opinion | As Crimes of Apartheid Worsen, the West’s Exceptionalism Toward Israel Must End