Israeli forces entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday, clashing with Palestinians who protested the entrance of Israeli settlers marching to celebrate the anniversary of the occupation of East Jerusalem.
The entrance of Jews into the facility marked the first time in about 30 years such a visit was allowed during the final days of Ramadan. Omar al-Kiswani, Al-Aqsa mosque director, accused Israel of violating an agreement to not allow visits during this time.
Early in the morning hundreds of settlers marched up to the gates demanding entrance to Al-Aqsa, according to Al Jazeera reporter, Harry Fawcett. The arrival of the settlers sparked Palestinian protests and the IDF stormed the mosque with stun bombs, rubber bullets and tear gas.
One Palestinian man was suffered a head injury and others were treated for gas inhalation, according to a medic for the Palestinian Red Crescent.
On Friday, a Palestinian teenager was shot dead by the IDF while trying to enter occupied East Jerusalem to offer Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa mosque. He was identified as 16-year-old Abdullah Loyd Gaith, from the occupied west bank city of Hebron.
Ah, those Abrahamic religionists… how they carry on. Too bad they have nukes and think it’s part of the divine plan to turn the rest of us into cinder cakes. Heaven help us all.
Zionism is less a religion than an ideology.
Don’t leave the Christian Zionists out of it. They’re as crazy as Satanyahu.
Christian Zionism is less ideology than pathology.
It’s little wonder that this subsect that was recently burning crosses and little girls now embraces genocidal maniacs.
It never was a religion. It is a late 19 century nationalist movement similar to other nationalisms of that time. The lack of a coherent Palestinian nationalim until the 1960’s provided Zionism with a power vacuum it could fill.
Guess they were too busy fighting the Ottomans to notice their ally with the dagger selling them out behind their backs.
Apartheid is too gentle a word to describe the Israeli regime. Even fascist might be too gentle a word. The Palestinian people are experiencing a slow motion genocide similar to the genocide of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century and in violation of the UN convention on genocide. Like the 19th century US, Israel is a democracy for the settlers. Like the 19th century US, or Germany of the 1930’s, the Israeli polity is divided between the parties that act to advance genocide and the parties that acquiesce to the genocidal colonizers.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has maintained the Doomsday Clock since 1947. We need a Genocide Clock to measure how Israel is inexorably moving closer to a holocaust. If there was a Genocide Clock for Palestine, the time would be far past Kristallnacht.
The Palestinians have chosen to resist. Resistance is their right and their only hope. We need to support their resistance to genocide. BDS is the most effective nonviolent way to oppose the genocidal trajectory of the Zionist regime.
“{The Palestinian people are experiencing a slow motion genocide”
Indeed — so slow that their population is growing, not shrinking.
And Israel’s leaders declare the Palestinians don’t exist, place them in concentration camps (Gaza), kill and maim nonviolent protestors every week at the Gaza fence, prohibit them teaching their narrative or identity to their children, deny them medical care, water, fuel and food, and debate revoking their citizenship and expelling them from their homeland. Read the UN Genocide Convention and connect the dots yourself.
Already did.
If the Israelis are committing “genocide,” they’ve been doing a poor job of it for decades.
The “genocide” claim is just another version of “everyone who does something I don’t like is Hitler.” Even if the thing you don’t like is really, really, really bad — like, say, Israel’s policies and actions — it is what it is, not whatever word happens to sound the worst.
Were the Native Americans subjected to genocide? The methods and mind-sets of the colonizers are similar. The effectiveness of the Palestinian resistance does not mitigate the crimes of the Zionist colonizers.
Well — 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out over about 500 years, so it was certainly an attempted and nearly successful genocide.
The Palestinian Arab population is several times as large today as it was in 1948, it’s still growing, and in fact it’s growing faster than the Palestinian Jewish population.
Words mean things. Israel policy is wrong and evil, but until there start being fewer Palestinian Arabs rather than more, it’s either not attempted genocide or it’s incompetently attempted genocide, and it’s certainly not successful genocide.
The Palestinian resistance was effectively smashed after the intifadas of the early 2000’s.
Basically, the world let the Israelis crush the secular militias. The Arab allies deserted the PLO, and Iran backs Hamas, a cult not congruent with the relative Western outlook of most Palestinians.
Well — 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out over about 500 years, so it was certainly an attempted and nearly successful genocide.
The Palestinian Arab population is several times as large today as it was in 1948, it’s still growing, and in fact it’s growing faster than the Palestinian Jewish population.
Words mean things. Israel policy is wrong and evil, but until there start being fewer Palestinian Arabs rather than more, it’s either not attempted genocide or it’s incompetently attempted genocide, and it’s certainly not successful genocide.
The parallels to Israel and the USA are that both countries were settler colonies with “democratic” government for the settlers that disenfranchised and dehumanized the indigenous. Neither country ever had an official policy of genocide. Both countries demonized the indigenous peoples as did the KKK. There is something about racist pathology that reverses the victim-oppressor relation in the oppressor’s mind. E.g., Where did “Indian giver” come from? Yet, in hindsight, both countries were gripped by a genocidal mentality that dehumanized and ultimately destroyed the indigenous people.
The Palestinian genocide is not as advanced as the Native American genocide because:
1. The Zionists have only had dominion over the Palestinians for 71 years;
2. The Native American genocide was assisted by the European diseases that destroyed most of the native populations;
3. The North American natives were a few million people with a stone age culture who were overwhelmed by tens of millions of immigrants from advanced industrial societies. The Palestinians outnumber the settlers and have an advanced culture. No such culture has ever been successfully assimilated or annihilated in modern times.
4. The Zionist genocidal project was encumbered by the humanitarian values of European and Sephardic Jews who traditionally empathized with other persecuted minorities. The transition from an enlightened persecuted people to a racist settler population took several generations in Israel. Unfortunately, contemporary Israeli Jewish society has devolved to the point that there are very few remaining critics of Israeli apartheid or its increasingly murderous policies.
Contemporary Israel reminds me of two stories in the old testament. Abraham came to Canaan as a refugee and prostrated himself before the natives to beg for a place to bury Sarah. Because of his righteousness he was embraced by the indigenous people of Canaan. Joshua came to Canaan as a conqueror on a mission of genocide. Following the Nazi Holocaust the European Jews should have come like Abraham. They chose to come like Joshua.
The second story is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah because there were not enough righteous people to prevent divine destruction of the cities. Unfortunately, there are not enough righteous Jews left in Israel to prevent the upheaval that will eventually return the land to the Palestinians. I hope when they are ascendant, the Palestinians will treat their former oppressors better than they have been treated.
And the non-parallel between the USA and Israel is that the USA actually killed off 90% of the indigenous population, while both indigenous populations in Palestine (Arab and Jewish) have continued to grow.
So, again: If the population you’re trying to kill off is growing instead of shrinking, either you’re not doing genocide or you’re doing an incredibly bad job of it.
Most nations don’t recognize birthright citizenship. More important, the question of who can live in a liberated Palestine likely won’t be based on birthright, religion or ethnicity. Rather citizens of a single state will have to be good neighbors to the Arab majority and recognize the entitlement of the Arabs and the descendants of Arabs dispossessed by the Zionists to reparations and restitution. Zionists who continue to believe in a Jewish supremacist state will probably be forced to leave. However, most of those would probably choose to leave, as many white South Africans left when Blacks got the vote.
I agree that the genocidal Zionists are working under handicaps. The British attempted subjugation of the Native American began in 1585. For over 200 years North American Native Americans in the present USA and Canada more or less successfully defended most of their territory despite being decimated by European diseases. The Native Ameircans wiped out or assimilated the Roanoke colony, almost wiped out the Massachusetts colony and probably could have wiped out the Virginia colony if they had been as ruthless as the settlers and followed up on their initial success in the Second Powhatan War. The Indians remained the dominant powers west of the Alleghany mountains until the 19th century. The Israeli Zionists have only been working at ethnic cleansing for less than a century.
Israeli Zionists were also handicapped by the enlightened tradition of Judaic culture. Jews were in the forefront of movements for tolerance in Europe. It would have been unthinkable for the Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust to support an apartheid state based on ethnic cleansing, murder and oppression. So it has taken time for Zionists to create a Israeli culture that would rationalize and support unthinkable crimes against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.
It’s not that complicated.
If you’re accused of murdering me, and I show up in court to testify against you, whatever you did, no matter how bad it was, it wasn’t murder. And I’m going to look like an idiot and a liar for claiming that it was, such that people are probably going to doubt any other claims I make about the things you did.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as policies leading to the extinction of an ethnic group. Murder is one form of genocide. But the Convention recognizes other acts that are genocidal.
The Convention was enacted to define the acts leading to the destruction of an ethnic group early enough to prevent another holocaust. By the time the German ruling party was encouraging pogroms, walling off ghettos and deporting Jews to slave labor camps , the Nazis were engaged in genocide. Israel has already done worse than the Nazis through about 1940 when the Nazis confined Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto (like Gaza). It was not until 1942 that the Nazis agreed to a final solution to exterminate European Jews. But the genocidal process began in the 1930’s. And something similar is unfolding in Israel.
“when the Nazis confined Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto (like Gaza)”
Thanks for making my point. When you compare cramming 400,000 people into 1.3 square miles, walling it off, then starving, murdering, or transporting the population to death camps to a largely self-governing area more than 100 times the size and with less than four times the population, you are simply screaming “don’t believe anything I say.”
Do you believe the Zionists are incapable of rationalizing a Palestinian Holocaust?
Of course not. They have a lot of atrocities to answer for. So many, and so bad, that making shit up just because it sounds worse hurts their accusers more than it hurts them.
Our difference is that you equate genocide with holocaust. The purpose of the genocide convention was to define and criminalize the process that creates the potential for a holocaust so future holocaust can be prevented.
You correctly point out that a genocide is not always effective. The genocide in Bengla Desh was stopped by the Indian invasion. The Tutsi’s survived the Rwanadan genocide and their population is increasing. Those acts were still genocidal. In hindsight we recognize that the treatment of the Native Americans in the 19th century USA was genocidal and equivalent to a holocaust as was the British policy of starvation misnamed the Potato Famine in Ireland.. The convention gives us the tools to define a slow motion genocide as a crime against humanity in time to stop it.
Imagine a genocide line with post 1942 Nazi Germany at one extreme and contemporary Norway on the other extreme. The Nazi campaign of industrial scale genocide is unprecedented in human history but the Nazis were committing genocide when they were pretending that the Jewish inmates of their concentration camps were criminals or terrorists and starving or working them to death.
In between Norway and post 1942 Germany on he genocide line would be Kristalnacht, South African apartheid, 19th century USA and modern Israel. Since its founding Israel has been moving down the line getting closer to Nazi Germany and further from Norway. At present, the Israel has moved beyond apartheid South Africa or even 1938 Nazi Germany. The distance between modern Israel and post 1942 Germany is less than the distance between Israel and Norway and Israel continues to move down the line.
While I don’t equate genocide with holocaust, you make some fair arguments.
And to be clear, I did not argue that the only possibility is that Israel isn’t engaged in genocide. I left open the possibility that they could just not be very competent at it.
Since Israel’s founding, the Palestinian Arab population hasn’t just grown by several multiples, it has also created a strong national identity out of one that didn’t even exist until the 1920s and a state that is recognized by most UN member nations, by the UN itself as a member state, etc.
Granted, they’ve had the “assistance” of Arab states that don’t want the people and do want a captive population to use as a propaganda instrument against Israel, but even with such “assistance” that’s a surprisingly strong response to alleged genocide.
Zionists are incompetent genociders because of (1) Palestinian resistance and (2) Jewish culture and history as a persecuted people resists racism against others.
For most of my adult life I supported a Jewish state in Palestine because I believed that Israeli Jews were morally incapable of inflicting on the indigenous people what had been inflicted on the Jews. I was wrong. Israel has crossed one moral red line after another. The Israeli peace movement has been almost thoroughly silenced. The Palestinians are completely dehumanized. Even Uri Avnery couldn’t conceive living in a majority Arab state.
The dehumanization and demonization of Palestinians in the consciousness of Israelis is a dangerous precursor to a holocaust. I don’t see any moral backstop left in Israeli Jewish society to prevent a catastrophe.
Genociders invariably see themselves as victims of their victims. We can quibble over the definition of a concentration camp. But confining millions of people behind barbed wire, dropping phosphorous on hospitals and schools, killing thousands of civilians, massacreing unarmed protestors every week, demolishing houses of family members of terrorists, denying millions of people medical care, food, fuel, prohibitting them from worshipping except on the occupation’s terms , invading and occupying their holy places, pardoning Jews who murder Palestinians, prohibiting Palestinain schools from teaching their own history is dehumanizing the victims.
The opposition to the dehumanization of the Palestinains has been effectively silenced in Israel. The danger of the persecution escalating to a holocaust is increasing.
The Nazi Holocaust showed that ordinary people are capable of acquiescing to.or even committing, inhuman acts. Zionism has shown that even good people are capable of participating in, or rationalizing, genocide.
The Who had a deep song about how sociiopaths like Hitler rationalize their crimes. “Behind Blue Eyse” was probably inspired by the Nazi Holocaust. But it applies to sociopaths generally, including the Zionists who see themselves as victims of their own victims and rationalize their perverse treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.
Check out the lyrics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg_TRaiWj4o
Thomas, you can ignore this post. I was wondering where my last reply went and I see it is below.
I’m not sure why, but sometimes I’ll approve a post that is automatically held, and then some time later it will move back to the hold. I don’t think that’s ever happened more than one time per post, but it’s annoying.
No one follows UN Conventions when inconvenient.
UN Conventions are useless.