We talk to Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian about the unfolding events in her home city of colonized Jerusalem & across Palestine. Dr. Kevorkian is Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law in the Institute of Criminology of the Faculty of Law & a professor in the School of Social Work & Social Welfare at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem & Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London.
The conclusion of the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan this week, which coincides with the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, has seen not the customary celebration of Eid al-Fitr, but a vicious upsurge of Israeli violence against Palestinians across historic Palestine. For some time, Israeli police have been suppressing demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrar in occupied East Jerusalem against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes by a right-wing settler organization as part of Israel’s continuing effort to dispossess & displace Palestinians all over ‘48 & the West Bank. Israeli police also barred Muslims from celebrating Ramadan at the Damascus Gate & from reaching the venerated Al-Aqsa Compound in the Old City & violated its sanctity with tear gas, noise bombs & military incursions into the holy site. Across Israel & the West Bank, violent settler mobs have reacted with fury against growing Palestinian protest & engaged in ugly attacks on the persons & property of Palestinians who are supposed to be their fellow citizens.
In response to these violations, Hamas & other militant organizations in Gaza have fired barrages of rockets that for the first time have succeeded in penetrating Israeli defenses & striking far from the Gaza border. These responses to Israeli violence were met with a full-out assault by Israel’s armed forces which massacred at least 139 Palestinians, most of them women & children, in Gaza’s open air prison. As always, homes, schools & other civilian infrastructure have been pounded in accord with Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine which advocates for the destruction of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.
Nonetheless, we have been treated to the customary spectacle this week of a mealy-mouthed US President & his appointees pronouncing on Israel’s right to self-defense while ignoring their closest ally’s endless violations of international & humanitarian law & the Palestinians’ own legal right, as an occupied people, to defend themselves & oppose the occupier. But as Palestinian protest spreads across all of Historic Palestine & throughout the diaspora, it is clear they are not waiting for a US president’s permission to exercise that right once again.
In a month when Human Rights Watch issued a report that showed that Israel is conducting an apartheid regime across the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea,” Israel’s violence must be seen in the context of its ongoing practices as a settler colonial state committed to the expansion of its territory & the displacement of Palestinians by every possible means: killings, dispossession, terrorization. HRW’s detailed report confirms what Palestinians themselves & their global solidarity networks have been saying for years. It is based not on the Israeli myths about democracy or “disputed territory” parroted by our mainstream press, but on the facts on the ground that constitute what the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court describes as “inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression & domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups & committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
