A Week Review of Occupied Palestine

A Week Review of Events in Occupied Palestine

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This week saw the Israeli education ministry suspend funding for four Orthodox Jewish schools for refusing to admit Ethiopian students into regular classes. The Israeli public feigned outrage at the racism, but all the while the Israeli public and government continue racist policies against the country’s 1.3 million Arab citizens. Had the Ethiopian students been Muslim instead of Falashas Jews the government and public would not had noticed nor cared:

Every day security guards check people entering Ben-Gurion International Airport on whether their accent sounds Arab, and no one complains. That is not racism. It’s how we have organized for ourselves an ethical code of double and triple moral standards. We fight against a few manifestations and close our eyes to other, far worse, examples. The case of the Petah Tikva pupils is the tip of the racism iceberg. Children engender special feelings; shameful revelations about the school system will always yield a scandal. But the very week the country was in a huff over the Ethiopians, Nir Hasson reported in Haaretz that Jerusalem invests NIS 577 a year in a pupil from East Jerusalem and NIS 2,372 in a pupil from West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity. That does not count here as racism. Neither does the fact that East Jerusalem lacks about 1,000 classrooms, only because its residents are Palestinian. No one howls against these revelations, no one is infuriated by them, including the president, who fights against racism.

Israeli and Zionist propagandists often claim that Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews and this makes peace harder to come by. While some Palestinian media is unfortunate in language, Israelis are the pioneers in the field of bigoted indoctrination. Since the illegitimate establishment of the state of Israel, Israeli textbooks have portrayed the Palestinians are as a people with no rights to land. That God gave the land to the Jews and the Palestinians are no different from other Arabs and are, in fact, the invaders to the land rightful belonging to the Jews. Palestinians have been thoroughly dehumanized in Israeli parlance and Israeli children are often indoctrinated, particularly the children living in illegal settlements, to hate all Arabs. The settler ideology is one of unqualified hatred of all non-Jews and especially Arabs. This is what a civilian training exercise run by a private company in the illegal settlements looks like:

He enjoyed the course and felt it was safe but morally questionable. “It could indoctrinate children with racist beliefs. It was sad to hear young kids express such racism. It makes the likelihood or reaching a peaceful settlement to the (Middle East) crisis seem more difficult.” In the group before his, James said, excited children shouted to their parents about being able to “shoot the Arabs.”

Israel often likes to state that it fights a multi-front war. And so it does: Israel fights against Palestinians, NGOs, media, United Nations, ect… And it also fights against academic freedom:

Israel has clamped down on the movement of foreign academics teaching at Palestinian universities in the West Bank, barring some from entering the region altogether or stamping “Palestinian Authority only” in the passports of others, preventing them from entering Israel.

An English-language instructor from Ireland who taught for several years at the Arab American University, in Jenin, was refused entry on August 23 when she returned to the West Bank.

In its war against Palestinians and Arabs, Israel long ago launched a propaganda war in order to undermine Arab self-confidence. This is an effort to create the image of Israel as the dominant power that can do what it pleases and that the Arabs, seeing this, have no choice but to accept Israel’s existence. This is the “Iron Wall” doctrine coined by Zionist Revisionist and the father of the Likud party Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In the early years of Zionist colonization, Jabotinsky looked around and realized that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in their midst and if the situation were reversed the Jews would not allow an Arab state. Thus Jabotinsky concluded that only if Israel erected an “Iron Wall” so crushing against the Arabs, then the Arabs will accept Israel if they feel overwhelmed by its power. Israel has stayed true to that doctrine. That is why Israel employs disproportionate force against Palestinians and all Arabs. But the “Iron Wall” goes beyond brute force it also includes Israeli fighter jets violating Lebanese air space and taunting the people of Lebanon to send the message: “Look at how strong we are, we can fly over your country and you can do nothing about it.” It includes Israel putting huge billboards near the borders of Lebanon and even Jordan, a nation at peace with Israel, that advertise $10 to $25 million rewards for any information about missing Israeli occupation troops. The reward is so high to send a message that Israel is that strong and that committed to its soldiers. And, of course, above all there is the constant harassment of Palestinians from denying them basic food, stealing their land, arrests, beatings, silencing their culture, uprooting their groves, prohibiting them from importing supplies, and the daily indignity of Israeli checkpoints of which over 600 litter the occupied West Bank. Israel thinks this strengthens its hand against the Arabs because Israel operates under the racist belief that Arabs “understand only the language of force.” But, as Hannah Arendt once wrote: “If there is one language the Arabs don’t understand it is the language of force.” All of Israel’s actions have ensured that the Jewish state while powerful now will not survive in the end. A nation seeking acceptance from its neighbors would not behave like Israel. But Israel is blinded by hubris, racism and short-sightedness. In the end, when the balance-of-power is on the Arab side do Israelis think that Arabs will forget such actions and forgive Israel? I assure you they will not. As a Palestinian poet once wrote, “All that you have done to our people is written in notebooks.” Israel’s actions have engendered so much anger that any Arab willingness to accept the Jewish state has long been extinguished. I can’t belabor this point enough: Israel’s crimes are so well-known by Arabs and so resented because of their barbarism and repeated barbarism that Arabs will never accept Israel. It is one thing for a colonial-settler state to be established and another for it to go around and commit massacres and then at the end of the day have the temerity to conveniently speak about peace. Israel’s actions are self-defeating and you’d think they recognize that in seeing that no matter the punishment they inflict on the Palestinians the Palestinians do not submit to Zionism. But Israeli occupiers still try:

>A Palestinian woman was to the Hebron Governmental Hospital, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, on Friday after she collapsed when Israeli soldiers attempted to strip-search her.

Palestinian medical sources reported Saturday morning that a Palestinian child died of wounds sustained Friday evening after Israeli soldiers opened fire at him in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

And, finally, Israeli likes to claim it was established to provide a safe haven for Jews. No Jews have ever been more worthy of a safe haven (which need not be in a Jewish state) than Holocaust survivors. Israel has a way of treating them:

How Holocaust survivor Yevgeny Bistrizky ended up on Israel’s streets

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