Our Wednesday News Analysis | Innocence and Evil on the West Bank

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/innocence-and-evil-on-the-west-bank/

By Jeremy Salt
Published April 15, 2023

It is a terrible thing for a child to die before the parent. On April 7 Rabbi Leo Dee lost not one but two of his daughters. They were shot while traveling with their mother from the Jordan Valley to Tiberias.

Driving in front of them in another car, the rabbi only knew something was wrong when there was no response from their mobile phones. The daughters, 15 and 20, died instantly. At their funeral, Rabbi Dee asked ‘How will I tell your mother?’ Two days later, lying seriously wounded in hospital, she died as well. Whatever the circumstances, these were catastrophic blows to a husband and father.

"In any case, he should be asking these questions of his own people, not the Palestinians.

What will be their future and what is going to happen to them if they continue the heinous acts of which they have been guilty for nearly eight decades?

Can it be supposed by anyone except themselves that they will get away with this forever,

that there is no point at which it won’t catch up with them?"

In the funeral orations, the anguished rabbi said the killer was the product of a broken culture “that doesn’t differentiate between good and evil,” whereas he brought up his children to know the difference. “The terrorist, who is he? What did he achieve …. Where’s his future?” he asked.

Rabbi Dee likened wrongdoing to taking cocaine: the killer “took 20 shots, one for each bullet” apparently fired at his wife’s car, “in order to numb his soul”, which is telling him ‘’you are pure evil.’’ Those who justify the killing, on social media, are also numbing their souls with cocaine: “Before long you can justify to yourself that any terrorist is justified to kill any innocent civilian.”

Rabbi Dee is an Englishman who brought his family to live in the West Bank settlement of Efrat in 2014. Efrat is regarded as the ‘capital’ of the Etzion bloc, established in 1927, abandoned in 1948 but re-established after the 1967 war and the occupation of the rest of Palestine.

Editor’s Note: Clearly dispossessing, displacing, imprisoning, and slaughtering the other cause a boomerang effect.

               "The region is home. Inside my soul and within all of my being, I am attached to the splendor of its many colors, their tints and hues; and, ALL my people. I understand intuitively why neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will ever leave. My story is the story of many Jews. We are blessed with diversity. That we are one immortal pure-race tribe, exclusively begotten from the seeds of Abraham is spiritual. Physically, it is improbable and genetically, implausible...

Read more: Innocence and Evil on the West Bank

ISRAEL, LEAVE RAMADAN ALONE

Israeli border police officers stand guard while Jewish Israelis visit the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem's Old City, during the Passover holiday the holy month of Ramadan, April 9, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Source: +972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/israel-ramadan-palestinians-al-aqsa/

By Samah Salaime
Published April 14, 2023

Instead of devoting ourselves to spiritual growth or being able to enjoy time with family, we Palestinians are made to fear this holy month.

“Imagine Christians praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and soldiers invaded in the middle of the night to force them out.

Would anyone have a problem with the worshippers if they grabbed sand from the boxes, picked up the lit candles or heavy statues of Jesus or the holy books, and took on the soldiers’ clubs and guns?

Would anyone call these faithful Christians ‘terrorists?’”

The entire Muslim world celebrates Ramadan, but Palestinians seem ordained to dread its arrival. For weeks, Israel’s intimidation machine has been preparing both its citizens and the world for tensions in Jerusalem during the holy fasting month, which this year coincided with the Jewish holiday of Passover. We also had to commence our fasting knowing that Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister and Temple Mount activist, was in charge of maintaining “order” around Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam and the heart of Palestinians’ religious and political identity.

Israel’s scare tactics even affected me, a far-from-devout Muslim, who loves this special month for its festivities, family gatherings, and community joys. The only thing left to see was the intensity of the violence to come. How much blood would be spilled? How many worshippers would be arrested? What price would Palestinian Jerusalemites be forced to pay for the government’s arrogance?

The Israeli authorities didn’t disappoint. In the first week of Ramadan, Israeli Border Police broke into Al-Aqsa Mosque and assaulted worshippers during the fajr (dawn) prayer, which marks the beginning of the daily fast. A week later, Mohammed Al-Osaibi, an Arab citizen and doctor from the town of Hura in the Naqab/Negev, was murdered by 11 bullets at the Chain Gate (Bab al-Silsela) in Jerusalem’s Old City. The cops claim that he carried out an attack, yet gave no proof or evidence to back it up — despite the area being one of the most heavily surveilled in the country. The Palestinian community in Israel, from the north to the south, protested and called for a general strike...

Read more: Israel, leave Ramadan alone

ISRAEL’S ONE-STATE REALITY

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs clearly regards Israel as a single regime, as shown in its map of Nature Reserves and National Parks.

Source: Jewish Voice for Labour
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/israels-one-state-reality/

By Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, Foreign Affairs
Published April 15, 2023

It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution

"For half a century, the peace process allowed Western democracies to overlook Israel’s occupation in favor of an aspirational future in which the occupation would come to a mutually negotiated end.

Israeli democracy (however flawed) and the nominal distinction between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories also helped outsiders avert their gaze.

All these diversions are gone.

The one-state reality has long been embedded in Israeli law, politics, and society, even if it is only now being broadly acknowledged.

No ready alternatives exist,
and it has been decades since there was any meaningful political process to create one."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in Israel with a narrow, extreme right-wing coalition has shattered even the illusion of a two-state solution. Members of his new government have not been shy about stating their views on what Israel is and what it should be in all the territories it controls: a Greater Israel defined not just as a Jewish state but one in which the law enshrines Jewish supremacy over all Palestinians who remain there. As a result, it is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.

Israel’s radical new government did not create this reality but rather made it impossible to deny. The temporary status of “occupation” of the Palestinian territories is now a permanent condition in which one state ruled by one group of people rules over another group of people. The promise of a two-state solution made sense as an alternative future in the years around the 1993 Oslo accords, when there were constituencies for compromise on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides and when tangible if fleeting progress was made toward building the institutions of a hypothetical Palestinian state. But that period ended long ago. Today, it makes little sense to let fantastical visions for the future obscure deeply embedded existing arrangements...

Read more: Israel’s One-State Reality