Our Wednesday News Analysis | Opinion | Israelis Still Expect the Palestinians Will Surrender. They've Never Been More Wrong

Palestinians wave the national flag during a protest against an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Nablus, along the border fence with Israel, east of Gaza City, last week. Palestinian officials say several Palestinians were killed and over a hundred were wounded during a rare daytime Israeli army arrest raid in the occupied West Bank.Credit: Adel Hana /AP

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-02-27/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/israelis-still-expect-the-palestinians-will-surrender-theyve-never-been-more-wrong/00000186-92f5-d716-a597-f6fdfb490000

By Daoud Kuttab
Published February 27, 2023

Israelis still falsely hope that their military operations will extinguish Palestinian opposition to living under occupation. Those army raids stoke retaliation, and they're the reason the Lion's Den militant group is so popular - they dare to take on the Israelis

“… provide a horizon and give Palestinians hope instead of despair.
Israelis search for all manners of security, except on the political level.”

Part of the problem with the way Israelis approach the conflict is that they have the false idea that their problem is not with all the Palestinians, but that only a few who they believe are stirring trouble. Or they might believe their own hasbara (propaganda) that Palestinians die and get arrested fighting the Israelis simply because they are told by the Palestinian Authority that their families will be rewarded financially.

A critical recent example of this dynamic was last Thursday’s dangerous daytime operation in Nablus by the Israeli military. We may never know its real goal, but in political and strategic terms it will be difficult to argue that this was a successful operation.

Israeli security personnel dressed as Muslim worshippers carrying prayer mats and some wearing full female veils entered the old city of Nablus in the northern West Bank. Snipers took positions on the roof and began an operation against armed members of the Lion’s Den Palestinian military resistance group.

The operation ended with eleven Palestinians including a child and two older men killed. Lion’s Den said that six were members of its group. (This, despite initial reports on some Israeli media outlets that all those killed were “terrorists”). One medical nurse, Elias Al Ashqar, was trying to resuscitate an older man only to discover that the fatally wounded 65-year-old man was his own father.

It is hard to fathom why Israelis with their traumatic historic experiences can’t understand that people don’t like to live under foreign military occupation. People might accept an occupation for a short while but will not accept it forever. When the Israelis stormed Jenin recently killing ten including an elderly man, what did they expect would happen in reaction? When the orders were given to storm the biggest city in the West Bank, Nablus, what did they expect?...

Read more: Opinion | Israelis Still Expect the Palestinians Will Surrender. They've Never Been More Wrong

'TRUTH, NO MATTER WHAT': WHY WATERING DOWN PALESTINIAN REALITY IS A CRIME

American civil rights leader Malcolm X (1925 - 1965) [Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

Source: Middle East Monitor
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230224-truth-no-matter-what-why-watering-down-palestinian-reality-is-a-crime/

By Dr Ramzy Baroud
Published February 24, 2023

On 20 February, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a 'watered-down' version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory."

"...the Zionist discourse is uncompromising in its violent and racist nature which, ultimately, contributes to the erasure of Palestinians as a people with history, culture, real grievances and rights.”

The intrigues that led to the scrapping of what was meant to be a binding resolution will be the subject of a future article. For now, however, I would like to reflect on the fact that the so-called international community's relationship with the Palestinian struggle has always attempted to 'water down' a horrific reality.

While we often rage against statements made by US politicians who, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, refuse to even acknowledge that Israel is occupying Palestine in the first place, we tend to forget that many of us are, somehow, involved in the watering down of the Palestinian reality, as well.

While reports by B'tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, dubbing Israel an 'apartheid state', are welcome additions to a growing political discourse making similar claims, one must ask: why did it take decades for these conclusions to be drawn now? And what is the moral and legal justification for 'watering down' Israel's apartheid reality for all of these years, considering that Israel has, from the moment of its inception – and even before – been an apartheid entity?

The 'watering-down', however, goes much deeper than this, as if there is a conspiracy not to describe the reality of Palestine and the Palestinian people by its proper names: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, apartheid and more...

Read more: 'Truth, no matter what': Why watering down Palestinian reality is a crime

THE PROBLEM WITH ISRAEL’S SO-CALLED ‘CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY’

Photograph Source: Daniele Marcucci – CC BY 2.0

Source: Counterpunch
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/24/the-problem-with-israels-so-called-crisis-of-democracy/

By NEVE GORDON
Published February 24, 2023

Since the start of the new year, reading about Israel in the Hebrew-language press has been an unnerving experience.

"Sure, there is democracy in Israel –
but it is more similar to the one that existed among whites in apartheid South Africa
than it is to the democracy that currently exists in the United Kingdom or France."

One article described a maternity ward in which a Palestinian woman from Nazareth was persuaded to move rooms after a Jewish woman complained about sharing the same space with a non-Jew.

Another article revealed that the Israeli military commander responsible for the West Bank recently distributed to his officers a messianic pamphlet – “The Secrets of the Land Redeemers, from Abraham our Father to the Young Settlers” – on how to seize Palestinian land.

A third reported that the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli military fire in the West Bank in 2022 has been the highest in 18 years.

A fourth explained how Israel’s Supreme Court approved the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in eight villages and the Israeli military’s demand to hold regular training exercises in that same area.

Domestic news stories like these, which inadvertently expose the grim everyday realities of Israel, seldom make it into international news bulletins. One likely reason why international media outlets do not cover these stories is that if they did, such reports would profoundly challenge the current narrative the very same outlets have long been peddling about Israel: that Israel’s otherwise well-functioning and robust democracy is being threatened by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new far-right government.

Indeed, international coverage of Israel since the November 2022 elections has been more or less uniform. Article after article has warned us that the legislative changes proposed by the government would effectively enable it to annul Supreme Court rulings and decried legislation that gave National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir broad political control over the police, including those deployed to the West Bank, as a threat to the rule of law in the country.

Read more: The Problem with Israel’s So-Called ‘Crisis of Democracy’