A picture is worth a thousand words: Hundreds of Palestinian detainees and prisoners who were released on Saturday are seen on their knees, in prison, wearing white T-shirts bearing a blue Star of David and the words “we will not forget nor forgive.” Gideon Levy suggests that Israel’s revenge against Palestinians has gone on long enough, and it is time to see them as human beings, capable of feeling pain – and anger.
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reflects on the Israeli arrogance that allowed it to think it could ignore horrible injustices toward Gazans forever, and get away with it.
There aren’t many populations in the world as helpless as the Palestinians who live in their own country. No one protects their lives and property. They are totally abandoned to their fates. Their houses and cars can be torched, their fields set on fire. It’s all right to shoot them mercilessly, killing old people and babies, with no defense forces at their side. No police, no military: no one…
Gideon Levy asks, what did you expect? No people that has suffered as the Palestinian people has suffered will remain quiet, and that includes the Palestinian people between Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, and Jenin in the West Bank. Of course they will resist Israel’s brutal occupation, and it’s what Israel wants: an intifada, an excuse to spill Palestinian blood.
Violence is always brutal and immoral – and not just the violence of a lone Palestinian attacker with a knife. The state-sanctioned, uniformed violence that Palestinians endure daily. “The terror attacks are the punishment” for Israel’s crime of not dealing with the ongoing injustice.
Had the IDF wanted to, it could have known exactly who was inside the shack it targeted in Gaza. But it didn’t care, and now a little girl is left alone in the world.
Demolition of Palestinian homes – last week’s excuse was to create Israeli “nature reserves,” this week a “firing zone” – causes now-homeless Mahmoud Hamamdi to ask, “Who is the terrorist: the one who builds a house or the one who demolishes a house?”
There’s no longer any real debate in Israel. The right wants to annex Palestinian land openly, and the center wants to annex, but deceive us. All that’s left now is to admit to the world that in reality Israel annexed the West Bank many years ago… it’s one country with an apartheid system.
Israeli settlers have taken over dozens of springs in the West Bank, all of them on private Palestinian land, and are keeping the Palestinian owners away. Rina Shnerb, a Jewish teen, was murdered last week at one of them.
Israeli police in the village of Isawiyah have an agenda, and it involves brutality, incitement, humiliation, and violence.