EVERYTHING YOU ARE TOLD ABOUT ISRAEL IS FAKE

It’s A Completely Synthetic Nation Created Without Any Regard For The Organic Sociopolitical Movements Of The Land And Its People, Slapped Rootless Atop An Ancient Pre-Existing Civilization With Deep Roots.

Everything about Israel is fabricated. It’s a completely synthetic nation created without any regard for the organic sociopolitical movements of the land and its people, slapped rootless atop an ancient pre-existing civilization with deep roots. That’s why it cannot exist without being artificially propped up by nonstop propaganda, lobbying, online influence operations, and mass military violence.

Israel is so fake that its far right minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir has been stoking religious tensions by encouraging militant Zionists to pray on the Temple Mount — known to Muslims as Al-Aqsa. This is an illustration of how phony Israel and its political ideology are because Jews were historically prohibited from praying at the Temple Mount under Jewish law; a sign placed there in 1967 and still upheld by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate reads, “According to Torah Law, entering the Temple Mount area is strictly forbidden due to the holiness of the site.” It’s just this weird, evangelical Christian-like thing that Zionists have started doing in contravention of their own traditions and religious texts to advance their nationalist agendas.

Journalist Dan Cohen explains on Twitter:

“‘Prayer’ on the Temple Mount is 100% a Zionist invention in total contravention of Jewish law. Jews don’t step foot onto the Temple Mount, let alone ‘pray’ there. That’s why the sign below is posted at the entrance non-Muslims use.

“Ben Gvir publicly announced this in order to provoke a reaction to use as a pretext to restrict and expel Muslims from the site, explode Jerusalem and the West Bank, and expand the regional war.

“Ben Gvir holds Netanyahu hostage. Together, they’re leading Israel to self-destruction.”

There’s no authentic spirituality in such behavior. It has no roots. No depth. No connection. It’s the product of busy minds with modern agendas, with nothing more to it than that.

Israel is so fake that Zionists artificially resurrected a dead language in order for its people to have a common “native” tongue for them to speak, so that they could all LARP as indigenous middle easterners together in their phony, synthetic country.

Israel has no real culture of its own; it’s all a mixture of (A) organic Jewish culture brought in from other parts of the world by the Jewish diaspora, (B) culture that was stolen from Palestinians, and (C) the culture of indoctrinated genocidal hatred that is interwoven with the fabric of modern Zionism. The way Israel has become a Mecca of electronic dance music points clearly to an aching cultural void that its people are trying desperately to fill with empty synthetic pop fluff.

Even international support for Israel is fake, manufactured astroturf that has to be enforced from the top down, because it would never organically occur to anyone that Israel is something that should be supported.

The phenomenally influential Israel lobby is used to push pro-Israel foreign policy in powerful western governments like Washington and London. Just yesterday Representative Thomas Massie told Tucker Carlson that every Republican in Congress besides himself “has an AIPAC person” assigned to them with whom they are in constant communication, who he describes as functioning “like your babysitter” with regard to lawmaking on the subject of Israel.

The Israel lobby exists with the full consent of the western imperial war machine and its secretive intelligence cartel, because western military support for Israel is also phony and fraudulent. The western empire whose strategic interests directly benefit from violence and radicalism in the middle east pretends it’s constantly expanding its military presence in the region in order to promote stability and protect an important ally, but in reality this military presence simply allows for greater control over crucial resource-rich territories whose populations would otherwise unite to form a powerful bloc acting in their own interests. The Israel lobby is a self-funding consent manufacturer which helps the empire do what it already wants to do.

Support for Israel in the media is also phony and imposed from the top down. Since October outlets like The New York Times, CNN and CBC have been finding themselves fighting off scandals due to staff leaks about demands from their executives that they slant their Gaza coverage to benefit the information interests of Israel. Briahna Joy Gray was just fired by The Hill for being critical of Israel as co-host of the show “Rising”, a fate that all mass media employees understand they will share if they are insufficiently supportive of the empire’s favorite ethnostate.

Israel’s support from celebrities is similarly forced. A newly leaked email from influential Hollywood marketing and branding guru Ashlee Margolis instructs her firm’s employees to “pause on working with any celebrity or influencer or tastemaker posting against Israel.” As we discussed recently, celebrities are also naturally disincentivized from criticizing any aspect of the western empire by the fact that their status is dependent on wealthy people whose wealth is premised upon the imperial status quo.

Support for Israel on social media is likewise notoriously phony. For years Israel has been pioneering the use of social media trolls to swarm Israel’s critics and promote agendas like undermining the BDS movement. After the beginning of the Gaza onslaught Israel spent millions on PR spin via advertising on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, and The New York Times has just confirmed earlier reports that Israel has been targeting American lawmakers with fake social media accounts to influence their policymaking on Israel.

In truth, nobody really organically supports Israel. If they’re not supporting it because their lobbyists and employers told them to, they’re supporting it because that’s what they were told to support by the leaders of their dopey political ideologies like Zionism, liberalism and conservatism, or by the leaders of their dopey religions like Christian fundamentalism. It’s always something that’s pushed on people from the top down, rather than arising from within themselves due to their own natural interests and ideals.

Israel is not a country, it’s like a fake movie set version of a country. A movie set where the set pieces won’t even stand up on their own, so people are always running around in a constant state of construction trying to prop things up and nail things down, and scrambling to pick up things that are falling over, and rotating the set pieces so that they look like real buildings in front of the camera. Without this constant hustle and bustle of propagandizing, lobbying, online influence ops, and nonstop mass military violence, the whole movie set would fall over, and people would see all the film crew members and actors and cameras for what they are.

Clearly, no part of this is sustainable. Clearly, something’s going to have to give. Those set pieces are going to come toppling down sooner or later; it’s just a question of when, and of how high the pile of human corpses needs to be before it happens.

AMERICA DEFENDS ISRAEL’S “AURA OF POWER” IN IT’S GAZA GENOCIDE

As South Africa Accuses Israel Of Genocide, The Biden Administration Endorses Israel’s Bid To Sow “fear” In Gaza’s Defenseless Civilians.

Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.

Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in American weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.

A senior administration official insists that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”

How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. It has been reported: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.

Instead, America is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.

Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”

At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.

But just as the American regime is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the American regime is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7^th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7^th attack, the officials say.”

To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.

This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.

As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”

In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.

When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”

In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7^th. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”

Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.

The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”

Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former American ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7^th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of American arms to Israel and the American veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”

Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet American public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7^th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of American political support for its extermination campaign there.

In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”

But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”

Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”

ISRAEL LIED ABOUT AND ATTACKED AL-SHIFA HOSPITAL WHEN IT NEW THE REAL LOCATION OF HAMAS HEADQUARTERS

While Telling The World That Hamas HQ Was Under Al-Shifa Hospital, The IDF Had Already Found The Actual Command Center 8.5 km Away.

Although a few corporate news media have made it clear they don’t buy the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claim that al-Shifa Hospital has been a cover for a Hamas command and control center and weapons armory, Western media have failed to report a much bigger story.

The IDF and the Israeli government already knew when they launched their propaganda campaign about al-Shifa that Hamas had no military command and control facility hidden there because it had already found the complex kilometers away.

It was reported last week, for 15 years the Israelis claimed Hamas was operating its primary command and control base from a tunnel underneath al-Shifa. After the Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza began in October, the Israeli military amplified that message to press its contention that by hiding the Hamas high command, al-Shifa Hospital had lost its immunity from military operations under the law of war, and could now legitimately be taken over by force.

On Nov. 11^th, IDF spokesman Richard Hecht declared that al-Shifa was the “main hub of Hamas activity;” Newsweek reported the IDF regarded al-Shifa Hospital as “Hamas’s main command post” and the Times of Israel headlined “Hamas leaders again hiding under hospital”.

The crescendo of Israeli propaganda about al-Shifa being a “human shield” for Hamas came with a long report published by The New York Times on Nov. 14^th. It was based on interviews with eight present and former intelligence and defense officials, describing a vast military command complex under al-Shifa with multiple levels.

But something quite unexpected had happened during this new round of press stories on al-Shifa that completely demolished the entire IDF story line: the IDF had gained control of the real Hamas command and control center in an area where the Hamas leadership had previously had their above-ground offices in the Al Atatra neighborhood, in the extreme northwest of Beit Lahiya city, 8.5km away from al-Shifa.

After that office building was demolished, the IDF discovered a major tunnel facility that was quite certain had been the central headquarters for the Hamas high command – the command and control center for the entire war.

As the IDF leaked to The Jerusalem Post in a story published Nov. 14^th, the discovery was made “several days ago” of a tunnel with an elevator that reached thirty meters underground, compared with only five meters underground in other tunnels. Furthermore it had been equipped with oxygen, air conditioning and more advanced communications than seen anywhere else.

DISCOVERY OF REAL HAMAS HIGH COMMAND BUNKER

That major IDF discovery, made on or before the Nov. 11^th false stories about al-Shifa, threatened to undermine the Israeli political campaign to justify the IDF’s takeover and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals on the grounds that they were “human shields” for Hamas.

Al-Shifa Hospital was the centerpiece of that campaign, based on the claim that it was hiding the high command of Hamas in a tunnel underneath it. Obviously the IDF and the extreme right-wing Israel government would want to stop all further publicity about the discovery of the actual Hamas high command’s underground base.

No story about the discovery of the real Hamas high command bunker has been published inside Israel or elsewhere in the nearly two weeks since the detailed Jerusalem Post piece on Nov. 14^th. Somehow the Israeli government and media have been able to completely suppress the discovery of the Hamas headquarters, despite the fact that a number of foreign news media have offices in Tel Aviv and the story is still available on the internet.

Instead of forcing a major climb-down by the IDF and the Netanyahu and the Biden administrations, the discovery of the real Hamas underground high-command center merely brought a slight revision in the wording used to refer to the issue.

SULLIVAN REVISES WORDING OF ISSUE

That slight nuance was introduced not by the IDF, but by American National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Nov. 13th, when he said:

“You can see even from open-source reporting that Hamas does use hospitals, along with a lot of other civilian facilities, for command and control, for storing weapons, for housing its fighters.”

And an American official familiar with “U.S. intelligence” who may also have been Sullivan, commented that Hamas had a “command node” under al-Shifa Hospital, using a term that Israeli officials apparently adopted in light of the new discovery of the actual high-command bunker.

Thus the IDF arrived at al-Shifa late at night on Nov. 15^th, a day after The Jerusalem Post story, to begin the process of the Israeli takeover with a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the American public in particular that Hamas had been inside the hospital.

Several hours later that morning, in a seven-minute video inside the MRI building, IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus showed “grab bags” of military gear with AK-47s, grenades and uniforms neatly arranged on the floor. He insisted that Hamas had used the MRI room to store weapons and military gear. He also produced one computer, which he suggested had been found to contain “incriminating evidence” of military relevance.

The most obvious problem with this seven-minute video, however, is that it showed nothing that could not have been easily brought into the building by the IDF itself. The more serious problem with the presentation is that it offered no plausible reason for Hamas to have hidden a few dozen small weapons and other military gear in the MRI room of a hospital and then supposedly having left them there when they departed.

There was simply no need for the Hamas to store weapons there. After all, Hamas is estimated to have 150 to 300 miles of space for such storage in its vast tunnel network.

HAGARI VIDEO DELETED

A much bigger problem for IDF credibility on al-Shifa is that on Oct. 27^th, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari presented an artist’s conception showing that Hamas had taken over parts of five different buildings at al-Shifa Hospital and was using all of them to plan and coordinate its military activities.

He also showed a drawing of the structure of the main building, which he insisted was based on Israeli intelligence, showing that an underground floor of the main building was completely controlled by Hamas. He also insisted that there was an entrance within the hospital to that underground floor.

The Hagari presentation came before the discovery of the actual Hamas high-command bunker underneath the above-ground Hamas high-command office in Beit Lahiya. The IDF has now eliminated the entire video of that long, detailed and illustrated presentation by Hagari from its website, because it would become a major embarrassment to the IDF once the full truth is known.

In recent days, the IDF has fixed the world’s attention on a tunnel, the opening of which was discovered very close to the outer fence of al-Shifa Hospital grounds. The tunnel was found by the IDF to be 10m deep, compared with the 30m deep abandoned high command tunnel.

On Nov. 21^st, the IDF announced it had breached the heavy blast door of the tunnel, meaning that it could now determine what lay on the other side, if anything. But given that the IDF has already discovered the real Hamas command bunker elsewhere – and the absence of evidence of a connection from hospital buildings to a tunnel – the IDF is unlikely to find such a connection from the tunnel to the hospital.

The real story of the Israeli effort to sell its argument that Hamas took over al-Shifa and other hospitals to coordinate attacks is the massive deception aimed at the American media and public opinion in order to justifying Israel’s war of obliteration of the population of Gaza.

That campaign of deceit has had the full-throated support of the Biden administration, which stands equally guilty of misleading the American people in its support for an illicit Israeli war.

The failure of the Israeli propaganda campaign has been so decisive that some major media organizations have explicitly distanced themselves from the Israeli claims about al-Shifa, and several have shown either field reporters or analysts in the studio declaring explicitly that the evidence displayed by the Israelis had not proved their case at all.

JERUSALEM IS READY TO EXPLODE – THE WORLD CAN’T SAY IT WASN’T WARNED

The Palestinians Have Been Abandoned, Neglected And Betrayed. Now Their Fate Rests In The Streets. It Has Always Been This Way.

Barely a month has passed since Jared Kushner, former American President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, declared the Arab-Israeli conflict over.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Kushner declared that “the political earthquake” unleashed by the latest wave of Arab normalizations with Israel wasn’t over. Indeed, Kushner enthused, more than 130,000 Israelis had already visited Dubai since Trump hosted the signing of the Abraham Accords last September.

New friendly relations were flowering between Jews and Arabs. Just wait for the direct flights between Morocco and Israel. Saudi Arabia would soon be next. “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Kushner wrote triumphantly.

No American figure has written anything so arrogant and been so wrong since President George W Bush landed on an aircraft carrier after the invasion of Iraq sporting the fateful banner: “Mission Accomplished”. It was a claim Iraqi IEDs made American coalition soldiers swallow for many years thereafter.

Kushner regrets nothing. He knows he is right, because he has God on his side. But even among secular nationalists, Kushner is by no means alone in thinking that the seven-decade old conflict is over bar the shouting.

MINORITY RULE

To be Israeli is to notch up one territorial victory after another – the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the settlements around it, the Jordan Valley. Each year the state of Israel expands to inhabit a little bit more of the Land of Israel, the traditional Jewish name for territory that stretches far beyond the 1967 borders.

Israel has long since established itself as the only state between the river and the sea, one increasingly incapable of tolerating any other political identity alongside it. This is their solution to the conflict, where the Jewish minority rules over an Arab majority.

To be Palestinian is to receive one blow after another – America’s acceptance of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel; a new president in the White House who once said that if Israel did not exist, America would have to invent it; the headlong rush to invest in, and trade with, Israel – even by Arab countries which have yet to recognize it.

Their own leadership is isolated and hopelessly divided. On Thursday, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, officially postponed the first elections in 15 years. Israel’s refusal to allow Jerusalemites to vote was the pretext for this. “As soon as Israel agrees [to let Palestinians vote in Jerusalem], we’ll hold the election within a week,” Abbas said in a televised speech. But, as everyone knows, the cause of this indefinite delay resides in the certain blow Abbas would receive if he did go to the polls. His party, Fatah, has split into three lists, of which the list he heads is the least popular. Abbas’s search for a popular mandate is looking increasingly troubled.

So this is what the end of conflict looks like. It’s only a matter of time before the Palestinians see that their best interest lies in giving up, Kushner and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calculate. Besides, the Palestinians already have a state of their own. It’s called Jordan.

IN VICTORY, THE PERIL IS GREATEST

All of which is dangerous make-believe. The project to establish Israel as a Jewish state has never been in more peril than it is now, when it thinks it is on the cusp of victory. For the real earthquake rumbling is not the one that signals an end of conflict, nor is it rumbling in the West Bank or Gaza. It is shaking Israel, in Jerusalem and in the territory it took in 1948.

It is between the Palestinians – who are either Israeli citizens or Jerusalemites – and the state itself, and it has Jerusalem at its center. No wall or checkpoint will protect Israel from its consequences.

The following exchange between a Palestinian protester and a Jewish TV reporter was recorded in front of the Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem recently. “Where was your grandfather born?” asks the Palestinian. “Where my grandfather was born? In Morocco,” replied the Mizrahi presenter. “Not in this land, right? He was not here. And he did not come here before, right?”

“So, what do you mean?” “As for me, my grandfather and his father were born here.” “Do I have to return to Morocco? Is this what you mean?” The Palestinian answered: “This land is not for you… this land is not yours. Jerusalem is ours and it is Islamic.”

The spark for the confrontation was the decision to ban Palestinians from sitting in the courtyard and stairs in front of Damascus Gate, where Palestinians used to sit after prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque. The reason for the continued closure this year was Covid-19, but this provoked outage. “Did they perform the closure when there was Purim and Passover for the Jews? They must open the courtyard and stairs for us,” the demonstrators demanded.

ETHNIC CLEANSING CAMPAIGN

There are many more serious threats to their way of life, but the attempted closure of this area appeared to be the last straw. Jerusalemites face an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing. They are either being forced to destroy houses built without planning permission, or they face expulsion from their homes. A fresh round of expulsions is set to take place in Sheikh Jarrah on 2 May, which could prove to be another spark for mass protest.

Over on the coast in Jaffa, confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis have another cause: the sale of so-called absentee properties to settlers. These are the properties in Jaffa whose Arab owners fled during the Nakba in 1948 and which are now occupied by Palestinian tenants with lifetime tenancy.

In 1948, the newly formed state of Israel expropriated these properties in Jaffa, which at the time constituted 25 percent of all the real estate in the country. For three years, Amidar, the Israeli state-owned housing company, has offered tenants the right to buy, but at prices they can not afford.

The sale has created an instant flash point. For weeks now, Palestinians in Jaffa have been gathering to demonstrate. Graffiti proclaiming “Jaffa is not for sale” has gone up in Arabic and Hebrew. The clear intention is to replace the city’s Arab population with Jewish setters.

Clashes between police, settlers and Jaffa’s Palestinians took place after two Palestinians from the al-Jarbo family, who are facing evictions from a residential building in the al-Ajami neighborhood, reportedly assaulted the director of a Yeshiva, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, as he attempted to view the property. Amidar is planning to expel Palestinian residents of the property and sell it to the rabbi, who wants to turn it into a synagogue.

Over in the northern city of Umm al Fahm, and other Arab towns in the Northern Triangle and Galilee, there is yet another cause of protest. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have demonstrated against police inaction over armed gang violence for eight Fridays in a row. In each of these protests, the Palestinian flag has re-emerged. The chants are against the occupation, and yet this is all happening within the 1948 borders of Israel itself.

And so the mass chants go: “Greetings from Umm Al-Fahm to our proud Jerusalem. O Zionist… can you hear? Closing the roads is on the way. Time revolves… and after night there will be day. From beneath the rubbles we rise… from beneath the destruction we are reborn. Paradise, paradise, paradise… remain safe O our homeland. Greetings from Um Al-Fahm to our proud Jerusalem.”

A NEW GENERATION

The protesters are young, fearless and leaderless. Neither Fatah nor Hamas hold any sway here. All think of themselves not as citizens of Israel, but as Palestinians whose land and rights have been taken over by the Israeli state. They chant national Palestinian slogans.

Meanwhile in the Negev in the south, Israeli bulldozers have achieved something of a record. They have destroyed the same village, al-Araqib, for the 186th time. The tension is a nationwide phenomenon. It is in the north, south, east and west. The epicentre of this spreading revolt is not Umm al Fahm or Jaffa. It is Jerusalem. Every dawn buses bring people from Palestinian towns from within 1948 borders to pray. They are called “Al-Murabitun”, the protectors of Al-Aqsa.

The chant from Shafa Amr: “O Jerusalem do not shake… you are full of Arabism and might.” From Jerusalem: “Forget about peacefulness… we want stones and rockets. O Aqsa we have come… and the police will not deter us.”

These protesters are not uniformly motivated by religion nor are most of them socially conservative. Piece by piece, a national protest movement is forming, just as the First Intifada did, but this time it is not happening in the West Bank or Gaza but within Jerusalem and the 1948 borders of Israel itself.

A new generation is rediscovering the need to take to the streets. And a new axis is being formed. It is not pointing eastwards from Jerusalem to Ramallah, but west from Jerusalem to Jaffa. The security forces in Israel do not know how to react. According to Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth, there is dissension between various branches of the security forces on how to react.

Senior officials within the army and the intelligence services, the newspaper reported, have expressed “a professional disappointment in the conduct of the police within Jerusalem during the recent confrontations, for there was no sufficient preparation and dealing with the early events provoked emotions.”

The paper said that the intelligence services warned the police against closing the stairs leading to Bab al-Amoud “because of the explosion it would cause in the region”. The authorities gave way on the closure of the space in front of the Damascus Gate, to wild celebrations.

ON THE BRINK

There is fuel in the air. It will not take long before it finds another spark. Jerusalem is on the brink of an explosion.

Are Israel’s international allies going to sit back and await the death and bloodshed that would inevitably accompany a fresh uprising? Joe Biden has embarked on a bid to restore American leadership by staking out a foreign policy allegedly based on support for human rights. His administration is the first in American history to recognize the Armenian genocide.

But if Biden actually wants to make a difference, it is not the past he should be talking about, but what is happening right now in front of his nose. If this new president’s attachment to human rights is genuine and not just a cynical collection of sound bites, he should not be talking about history, he should be making it. Biden should start to deal with the biggest serial abuser of human rights: Israel.

That there is injustice and discrimination that meets the internationally agreed definition of apartheid, there can no longer be any doubt. One human rights organization after another has produced exhaustive and scholarly reports testifying to its existence. Last month, it was B’Tselem. This month it was Human Rights Watch. Does Biden challenge this evidence? Does he agree with Israel that these reports are fictional?

The weight of evidence can no longer be ignored, the human rights abuses occur daily.

Day by day, the state of Israel, not merely its settlers, or the far right, has become more extreme in enforcing its sovereignty over the people whose lands it has seized. For how long then can Biden defend a regime whose existence depends on the daily use of force over a people that make up 20 percent of its citizens and the majority of the population between the river and the sea?

The Abraham Accords Israel signed with two Arab states were a delusion. Netanyahu calculated that opening relations with Arab states was the means by which he could bypass a Palestinian state and ignore Palestinian rights. He was gravely wrong on both counts.

For Palestinians, it no longer matters how Biden or the rest of the world reacts. Abandoned by the international community, neglected by the media, betrayed by most Arab states, ignored by a leadership that has become irrelevant to their needs, their fate now rests in their hands alone. It rests in the streets. It always has been this way.

But don’t pretend you were not warned when conflict in Jerusalem explodes.

WARMONGERING IRAN LETTER FALLS FLAT IN THE SENATE

Pro-Diplomacy Groups Said The Letter, Led By AIPAC, Was An Effort Meant To Prevent Biden From Reentering The Iran Nuclear Deal.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) salutes as he arrives to address the gala banquet of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference in Washington March 22, 2010. Declaring “Jerusalem is not a settlement,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a defiant note on Monday after new American criticism of Jewish home construction in disputed territory in and around the city. His speech in Washington to AIPAC, an influential pro-Israel lobby group, contrasted sharply with an address American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made at the same forum hours earlier.

Forty-three mostly Republican senators have joined an effort backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to pressure the Biden administration to take a harder line on Iran.

Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had been pushing their colleagues for at least several weeks to sign a letter to President Joe Biden on the Iranian issue.

AIPAC, which has consistently called for a harder line on Iran and opposed the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts, promoted the letter as top priority during its annual conference, the Jewish Insider reported.

The hawkish pro-Israel group had already pushed 70 Democrats and 70 Republicans in the House of Representatives to sign a letter on Iran.

But the letter by Menendez and Graham was far less bipartisan, perhaps due to the senators’ previous efforts to derail diplomacy with Iran, with Graham having pushed for regime change and war. The two senators were joined by only thirteen Democrats and Senator Angus King (I–Maine), who is registered as an Independent but belongs to the Democratic caucus.

Only two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Ben Cardin (Md.) and Chris Coons (Del.) — joined Menendez, who chairs the committee. Ranking Member Jim Risch (Idaho) as well as Sens. Todd Young (Ind.) and Mike Rounds (S.D.) were the only Republicans on the committee to sign.

The letter calls on Biden to “use the full force of our diplomatic and economic tools in concert with our allies on the United Nations Security Council and in the region to reach an agreement that prevents Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons and meaningfully constrains its destabilizing activity throughout the Middle East and its ballistic missile program.”

Menendez and Graham’s effort was seen by JCPOA proponents as an attempt to derail a return to the 2015 nuclear deal and continue the Trump administration’s maximalist policies. J Street, a left-leaning pro-Israel group, lobbied senators not to sign on.

“There are legitimate concerns about a number of Iranian policies — nuclear, regional and domestic,” said Barbara Slavin, Director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “But there is only one feasible route to address them and that is by first rejoining the JCPOA. Those who demand a more ambitious agenda up front are just erecting obstacles to any diplomacy with Iran. The result will be a further deterioration in the status quo.” Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to strict limits on its nuclear program and international inspections in exchange for six world powers lifting the international embargo on the Iranian economy.

The Trump administration broke from the deal in 2018, replacing it with a strategy of “super maximum economic pressure” aimed at securing a “better deal.” Biden has condemned this strategy as a “dangerous failure” and vowed to return to the 2015 deal before negotiating on other issues.

NIAC Action, the National Iranian American Council’s lobbying arm, argued earlier this month that Menendez and Graham’s letter “would make the attainable impossible and risks setting President Biden on course for war with Iran” because it “suggests that the only acceptable agreement is one that addresses all concerns with Iran at once.”

“There is one clear option for the administration to roll back Iran’s nuclear program and create a pathway to begin negotiations on other areas of concern: returning to full compliance with the [2015 deal],” the pro-diplomacy group argued. “Any efforts to muddle or frustrate this pathway are not helpful and risk frustrating serious diplomatic efforts that are underway.”