by Luisa Morgantini

pubblished in Adista n. 38 – first week of November 2015

The israeli Defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, is leaving to Washington in order to cash , in addition to the 3.1 billion dollar already budgeted for by the Usa government, an extra weapons help of  1 billion dollar, whereas the help program for the Palestinians will suffer an already announced decrease of 80 million dollar.

In spite of the repeated violations of human rights and international legality, Israel is always excused and compensate by its most devotee supporter, the United States.

An agreement like the one achieved in Amman among the Jordanian king, the secretary of the State Department John Kerry and premier Netanyahu, is a new trap for the Palestinians: Kerry is just trying to stop the uprising.

Dead letters are the calls of the Palestinian leadership addressed to the international community for the protection of the Al Aqsa complex and of the people in the occupied territories, for the interruption of colonization and of settlers’ violence, for the end to Israeli occupation.

Kerry’s declarations all go in the direction of holding president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for not being able to stop the uprising, burst in a totally spontaneous way, with the chain effect of the attempted stabbings by some young Palestinians, individual acts to which Israel, as usual, react with collective punishments and retaliations, destroying the houses of the attackers (or alleged so), refusing to give back the corps of the assassinated for the burial, imposing street blocks, building walls in East Jerusalem too, incarcerating some 1.200 people in September alone. Israeli settlers, soldiers and police carry out summary executions, and kill with premeditations young people who, according to eye witnesses and video recording, didn’t even had a knife. Before the of October we have already 61 Palestinians killed (18 in Hebron alone), among them women and children. And Netanyahu, after the Amman agreement, recommend to cancel the residence for more than 100.00 Palestinians who, not for their choice, live beyond the wall, and again authorize the enlargement of illegal settlement as Itamar. In the meantime, from Israel, Kerry is satisfied with an agreement concerning only the Dome of the Rocks and the guarantee (in which nobody believe) that the Israeli government will not change its status by  forbidding the orthodox jews to pray inside the mosque and allowing them only the visit to the al-Aqsa complex.

But these people are not “tourists” curious to visit one of the most beautiful places in the world, but rather religious nationalists willing to rebuild there the Temple, destroyed by the Romans according them, restoring so the jewish sovereignty on the place. At the same time, minister Gilad Erdan decided the timetable for the visit to the mosques complex, forbidding it to the muslims between 7.30 and 9.30: a timetable that, before, was decided only by the Wafq, the islamic authority in charge. This is already a alteration of the status quo, as for the installation of video cameras controlled  by the israelis.

Don’t’ bat an eyelid nor the United Nations the European Union, who, with their vacuity and unwillingness to face the tangle responsible for the new uprising – the israeli military occupation, lasting by now from 1967 – become accomplice of Usa and Israel.

The real protagonist of the uprising are young people without any bond with organized political forces, by now in crisis and discredit, young people connected  to the world through the social media but who cannot, from the West Bank, reach the sea or Jerusalem, or, if living in Gaza, go out nor in the direction of Egypt nor in that of the West Bank. Young people that never in their life lived a single day of freedom, daily humiliated by israeli military control, by unemployment, by the perverse injustice of seeing demolished their house or those of their neighbors or relatives, by having fathers, brothers, friends jailed, by seeing or suffer those slaughters carried out in complete impunity.

We ought to know and give voice to the individual history of each of those boys and girls, analizing the reason pushing them to grab a knife. Acts to be condemned, that’s sure, but not a reason for calling them terrorists. Mass media adopt the prejudices about Palestinians “terrorists”, and so the settlers, even if illegal, are displayed like Israelis defending themselves – when instead they kill, burn, lynch – and about the young Palestinians executed is only said that they were “neutralized”

Some days ago, while together with other Israelis and internationals with his presence tryng to protect the Palestinians doing the olives harvest, rabbi Arik Asherman, from the association Rabbis for Human Rights, was attacked with a knife by a settler. It’s all provided with documentary evidence, but nobody tells a word about it. Really infrequent are the exceptions of people trying to understand the reasons of this uprising, nobody says that riots will go on bursting until the military occupation go on, that repression can stop them for a while but they will inevitably relight.

Israel is a sick country, who need to be saved from itself, permeated by racism not only towards Palestinians but inside it, towards the falasha, the africans, minorities. 

Incitements to racism are inside the words and the acts of rabbis, politicians, citizens. Since five years israeli reporter David Sheen provide documentary evidence and give testimony of the growth of a nationalist right wing, like that of minister Naftali Bennet who praise of having killed many arabs.

Netanyahu’s government abound of settlers and religious nationalists. In its attempt to demonize the Palestinians the prime minister went above and beyond saying that it was not Hitler to conceive jews extermination but al-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem. Writer Amos Oz, confronted with the repeated attacks of the settlers and with the murder, last year, of young Mohammed Abi Khdeir, forced to drink gasoline and set on fire, says that “we must not hide the truth: in Israel too we have neo-nazi groups like in Europe, with the only difference that in Israel they are supported by the government”.

The few left-wing forces still existing in Israel are submitted to defamatory campaigns and pointed at like traitors: it’s the case of Meretz and of the Members of Parliaments in the unitary list including various arab formation and the Hadash party, perpetually threatened of being expelled from the Knesset.

The uprising of young Palestinians is not a religious matter, it is not only for al-Aqsa, it is for dignity, for freedom. It isn’t just the uprising of knives: since many days, in villages and check points, young people try to open a gap in the street to affirm their right to walk in freedom through their land, facing repression and apprehension. Once again rocks against armed soldiers with the order of shooting and killing, soldiers who are for a 40% settlers, youngster sure that that land is their for divine right, and ruthless toward Palestinians.

In this situation, the activist from the  committees for popular nonviolent resistance, opposing  the Wall and the occupation – suffering arbitrary arrests and counting injured and dead because of soldiers bullets – are trying to join forces asking to palestinian leaders to trace a common line of behavior, not moving only on the level of international diplomacy.

But the vast majority of the people is blocked by fear, by the anguish of seeing their beloved leave home in the morning without knowing if they will come back, by the terror of seeing again the destructions happened in Gaza and the West Bank in 2002, when they all lived under curfew and the refugee camp of Jenin was burned to the ground, by the disillusion for the Oslo agreement which generated only more colonization of the palestinian land… if until 1991 the Palestinians could go to see the sea in Tel Aviv, now they cannot even go to Jerusalem or to the sea of Gaza.

No more hope? No possibility of an exit from this injustice situation?

Actually it could be easy, it would be enough a little coherence between declarations and facts, it would be enough to start saying to Israel: Stop now! Not to leave Israel unpunished, but make it pay for the violations of international law adopting, like the world did for South Africa, a political of sanctions.

As for us, civil society, we should mobilize, act on our governments, give voice to those palestinians and israeli who, together, say that occupation kill them all, believing that democracy, dignity and freedom are for the all of us.