Uprising in Palestine
JVL Introduction
As world attention understandably focuses on the inspiring female-led resistance to oppression in Iran, we cannot ignore the escalating violence in Palestine, where Israeli forces are attempting to crush popular Palestinian resistance.
In this illuminating video, from August this year, former Israeli Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, and Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, remind us of the intrinsic militarism of the Israeli state.
News of the resulting terror faced daily by the Palestinian people is available but largely ignored by mainstream media. Amira Hass, in a piece written for Ha’aretz and posted on Facebook by Jews for Justice for Palestinians, tells of the 7-year-old boy who died of fear of Israeli troops. Mondoweiss provides a full breakdown of “What is happening in the West Bank right now“. Orly Noy has explained the Israeli refusal to recognise Palestinian resistance as anything by “terrorism”. And Eli Machover has brought home the wider implications of allowing Israeli repression to continue unchallenged: “From Israel to the UK, democracy is being crushed in our names.”
We share below the uncompromising words of Adam Keller from Gush Shalom, writing for the Tikkun website:
“The West Bank is on fire,
As are the neighborhoods
Of East Jerusalem.”
This article was originally published by Tikkun on Tue 18 Oct 2022. Read the original here.
This no "terrorist wave" - It is an uprising!
The State of Israel is going
To general elections
But in the election campaigns
There is virtually no mention
Of the main, existential problem
Facing all who live in this country.
The West Bank is on fire,
As are the neighborhoods
Of East Jerusalem.
This is not “a wave of terrorism”.
This is an uprising
Of young people
Making a simple
And self-evident demand:
To be a free people
In their country.
Armed with stones
And a few light arms,
Young Palestinians are facing
The strongest army
In the Middle East.
Many of them pay
With their lives –
And they are not deterred.
They continue their struggle.
Two soldiers were killed this week.
A young man and a young woman,
Israeli contemporaries of
The Palestinians they face.
These soldiers were not “murdered”.
They were not “victims of terrorist attacks”.
They fell in the battle to which
The State of Israel sent them.
They fell in an unjust war,
A war for maintaining
An oppressive occupation regime,
A war for the settlers
Who steal Palestinian lands.
A war which is not worth fighting
And certainly not worthy
Of sacrificing one’s life.
The real heroes
Of Israel 2022,
Are the refusers and
Conscientious objectors,
Held behind bars
At the Kfar Yona military prison.
The prison to which the army gave
The Orwellian name “Abode of Justice”.
Young men who refuse to wear
The uniform of
An army of occupation and oppression
And prefer to go to prison.
Young women who reject with disgust
The distorted idea that for Israeli women,
Taking part in the oppression of
Palestinian women and men
Is some sort of
“Women’s Empowerment”.
They are the last remaining Israelis
In whom one can take pride.
The original? It would be good to read this poem in Yiddish…as well as Ivrit..in the 1920s especially and 1930’s the decades of the cultural=linguistic pogrom against Jews who spoke as their mother-tongues Yiddish and even !German! Ivrit was called the fascist language… does the narrative of this poem not support, with respect to the majority of Israeli poiticians, this description?
The video shows the stark and frightening reality of the situation in Palestine, which is the Zionists, who have corrupted the Jewish religion, do not want peace if it involves sharing the land, which they occupy by force, with the indigenous people of that land.
Nothing will change until the UN and its offices find their spine, stop their cowardice, stop appeasing Israel, and take action to force the illegal occupation to stop, and the land returned to Palestine and all those who have illegally imprisoned, terrorised, and murdered Palestinians face justice. Sadly I doubt if these Israeli atrocities will be stopped by the UN.
I think it was Dante who wrote that justice created eternal hell, but Orwellian speak is as old as the trauma which is too terrible to bear, and instates instead a discontinuity in logic, an event horizon, a separation of the material which cannot be admitted into the universe of love. In some traditions justice wears a blindfold – is that because tyrants cannot see the madness they perpetuate, or because they do so impartially, without feeling for either side? Modern ideas of inclusion fairness sustainability, not linked to an older cosmological restoration , face a problem assigning a purpose to bringing a life into existence, a life which must then have freedom to choose it’s own purpose. Who am I to commend those who have found the power of choice – conscience- to resist judgements grounded in the possibilities of power and conviction of a necessary cosmic order ? It may seem trite to offer Shakespeare as an aid to insight that justice is greater when it shows mercy. More profound when it exercises compassion. There is some hope for a modern peaceful justice , but while the state alternates between paranoia and omnipotence, the sacrifices – of different sorts on each side, are inevitably tragic. Every ounce of information about them is a step in the making of concrete political solutions and compromises.
If I can share Adam Keller’s heartrending poem ,that is where I should start, though people are so polarised, they may not be persuaded