Description

Photo:
Scene. File? Published by IMEMC News

Scenes. Published by Haaretz

See Videos by SILWANIC at IMEMC News Source link here
_____

by IMEMC News
May 30, 2022

On Sunday, Israeli soldiers abducted at least ten Palestinians and injured 79, in several parts of occupied Jerusalem after illegal Israeli colonizers conducted provocative marches in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Old City, and several parts of occupied Jerusalem.

Hundreds of Israeli colonizers marched from the Bab al-Amoud area in the Old City while carrying Israeli flags and chanting racist slogans, calling for removing the Palestinians from Jerusalem and denying the Muslims access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The WAFA Palestinian News Agency said the colonizers were hurling insults at the Palestinians and chanting slurs and racist slogans against the Muslim prophet Mohammad and chanting “Death To Arabs” and other slogans calling for demolishing Al-Aqsa and expelling the Palestinians from occupied Jerusalem.

Dozens of Israeli soldiers accompanied large groups of colonizers into the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and abducted ten young men.

The Wadi Hilweh Information Center In Silwan (Silwanic) said the soldiers assaulted and injured an elderly Palestinian man, Mousa Hijazi. and prevented dozens of schoolchildren from entering the courtyards of Al-Aqsa.

Silwanic added that the army surrounded the holy site’s courtyards, closed its gates, prevented hundreds of Palestinians from reaching it, and assaulted dozens of Palestinians, including elders, women, and children.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said the soldiers prevented its medics from entering the courtyards of the holy site and attacked its crews in the Old City while trying to reach a wounded young man on the al-Wad Street.

The PRCS stated that its medics provided treatment to seventy-nine Palestinians, including one who was shot with live ammunition.

It added that 78 Palestinians were injured, mainly after being shot with rubber-coated steel bullets. The others sustained injuries due to gas bombs or after being maced with pepper spray, and those who suffered various cuts and bruises.

The PRCS medics provided the needed treatment to the wounded Palestinians and moved twenty-eight of them to several hospitals in occupied Jerusalem.

Furthermore, the Israeli colonizers assaulted several three journalists, Layali Eid, Salam Mashriqi, and Lana Kamla, and their teams, including cameramen.

The colonizers also invaded the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem, caused damage to many Palestinian cars, hurled hurling stones and empty bottles, and fired live rounds at many homes.

They also attacked and caused damage to many homes in the Bab al-Magharba area in the Old City.

Also, the soldiers closed Bab as-Sahera, Salahuddin Street, and the al-Misrara neighborhood and assaulted many Palestinians who carried Palestinian flags and chanted for liberation and for ending the escalating Israeli violations against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and every part of occupied Palestine.

_____

Will Someone Finally Say Israel Has Lost It?

by Amira Haas for Hareetz
May. 31, 2022 4:29 AM

“The Arabs are raising their heads. They’re taking liberties,” complained Efrat Raz, a resident of the unauthorized, illegal outpost of Kida, to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Because he was killed, we know that her husband Noam Raz was a member of the Yamam police counterterrorism force that raided Jenin on May 13 and bombarded a house while its residents, including 11 children, slept inside. The armed men of the force also took a father and his daughter as human shields.

How many residents of the illegal settlements and illegal/unauthorized outposts serve enthusiastically, with devotion and high spirits in units that terrorize Palestinian children and induce trauma and fury in them for their entire lives? How many of their wives – and it’s reasonable to assume that they themselves – think “the Arabs are raising their heads?” How many of those wearing the white shirts that we saw in Sunday’s march of horrors in Jerusalem dream about joining the Yamam?

It would be important if they set the policy under which the role of the army and its policing branches is to protect and deepen the settlement enterprise. But the opposite is true: For over 50 years the messianic-nationalist stream has served as a convenient tool in the hands of secular Israeli governments, which worked diligently on advancing the Zionist project while grabbing the remnants of the Palestinian space, captured in 1967. A tool, let us repeat. A means.

The white shirts – since the dancing in Sebastia and the Purim celebrations in Hebron after the massacre carried out by Dr. Baruch Goldstein on Palestinian worshippers – would not have succeeded if they had not served so well the goals of all the Zionist governments and fitted into their plans. If not for the politicians (members of the Socialist International!) such as Shimon Peres and Yigal Allon who encouraged them, and planned very early the shattering of the West Bank as a Palestinian space; if the IDF had not demolished during the time of Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan three Palestinian villages at Latrun, and expelled their residents; if the police had not ignored, for decades, the violence of their “wild weeds”; if the army had not seized large areas for alleged military purposes and then passed them on to settlers; if the Israeli economists, architects and lawyers had not prevented Palestinian development – before and after the Oslo Accords.

The problem is that tools, like the Golem of the Maharal of Prague or of Walt Disney, tend to raise their heads. We saw this in the terrifying flag dance in Jerusalem on Sunday. Today, they are 50,000 wearing white shirts who marched in the heart of Palestinian Jerusalem. Yesterday they marched in Hebron and fulfilled there the vision of emptying it of Palestinians. Tomorrow they will be 100,000.

The violent outposts of the shepherds are also a registered patent of this holy white aesthetic. And as was confirmed by their patron, Ze’ev Hever from the colonizing movement Amana, these outposts have taken over a Palestinian space twice as large as the area of the lands the built-up settlements stole. How much will they succeed in stealing tomorrow? An area eight times the size, or only seven times? Today it is 2,600 dancing, pious Jews who went up on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. They have managed to expropriate almost completely the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs from the Palestinian public. Tomorrow they will be 7,000. How many of them will sign a petition to build the Third Temple? And when will they have a democratic majority in the Knesset?

Is there now in all the world’s countries a single responsible adult who will say openly: “The hell with it, this Jewish mutation that is developing there in the Middle East – in other words, the State of Israel – has lost it. Freaked out, lost its mind, gone crazy. Because of its military, nuclear and high-tech power, combined with all the religious fervor, because of its alliance with the United States, this needs to worry us. Very much so.”

In our cynical world, it is an unfounded expectation that any international body will appear, that such a responsible adult will stand up and act to stop this process, in whose creation Israel’s Jewish citizens are full partners.
_____

Nationalist Flag March Returns to Jerusalem in All Its Ugliness

At the end of the day, Jerusalem Day ended in a relatively calm manner. However, it may be too early to breathe a sigh of relief

by Nir Hasson for Haaretz
May 29, 2022

After a few relatively quiet years, then a year in which the parade was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and a year in which it was rerouted due to security tensions, the Flag March returned to Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate and Muslim Quarter, in all its ugliness.

In the years before 2020, under pressure from the High Court of Justice, the media and police, organizers of the march tried hard to minimize the violently racist chants of participants, and it seemed to work. Marchers who started singing “Death to the Arabs” and “May your village burn” were silenced by organizers and threatened with arrest by police. The marches continued in relative quiet, with some Palestinian stores along the route even remaining open.

This year, everything was reversed. From the morning hours, hundreds of marchers and celebrants started filling the streets of the Old City. At Moghrabi Gate, Temple Mount organizations racked up the highest number of Jews coming to the Mount in one day since 1967, with 2,600 arriving at the compound. Some of them bowed, some raised flags.

In nearby alleys, dozens of groups of Jewish youths chanted, cursed and blocked access to Palestinians. Police officers started to remove Palestinians from the streets and merchants understood what was about to happen and closed their shops. Some groups found alleys with no policemen and entered private yards, cursing and confronting Arab residents. But this was only the beginning.

At noon, other groups of Jews started streaming into the Old City, and the tide grew until the march began. Thousands of people passed through Damascus Gate, with the most popular song on their lips being a religious song that was sung at the ill-famed wedding of hate, following the lethal arson attack in Duma, ending with Biblical words taken out of context, calling for blinding Palestinians, “may their name be accursed,” the last words uttered in a scream. This song has replaced a song extolling Jerusalem, which used to be sung on this march in earlier years.

The more extremist groups went through the gate with ecstatic enthusiasm, singing “Death to the Arabs” and “May your village burn,” “Mohammed is dead,” “Shoafat is burning” and more. Other less extreme groups, singing less inflammatory songs, couldn't walk by without banging on the tin doors of the shuttered stores. One can only imagine what this sounded like to the hundreds of Palestinian families who were locked in their homes for hours.

At times it seemed the police had lost control. In one case, an elderly Palestinian woman raised her arms in response to the cursing and was met with pepper spray and kicks by the celebrants. When she was evacuated on a stretcher, water bottles were thrown at it. The Palestinians responded by throwing chairs and other objects. The Jews used tear gas. In another case, a Palestinian journalist was attacked, and in a third instance, a marcher pulled a gun and threatened Palestinians in the plaza outside Damascus Gate.

Clashes erupted in adjacent streets, with some injuries reported after both sides threw stones. Towards the end of the march, dozens of Jews attacked Palestinian houses and vehicles in Sheikh Jarrah. Palestinians responded by throwing stones. One Jew was injured.

The answer to the question of why did the march return to its earlier format this year can be found in two places. The first is the extremist campaign by Bibi-ists, which has been sweeping over the right wing in the course of the last year. Among Israeli flags there were three other flags at the march – Likud flags, flags with Benjamin Netanyahu’s face, and flags of the Lehava Jewish supremacist organization.

It seems that the hatred toward anything perceived as Arab, leftist or linked to the media has percolated for many months in the minds of the marchers, finding a vent as soon as they crossed Damascus Gate or encountered Palestinian passersby.

The second explanation is what happened to the march last year. The fact that after 30 years the march did not go through the gate and the Muslim Quarter was perceived as a debacle that must be amended, by holding a larger, more extremist march this year.

Here and there were people trying to silence the racist cries and calm things down, but this was usually met with disdain, if not vilification. One such person was Yaki Saada from the religious village Givat Washington, who argued with dozens of youths in an effort to stop the racist chants. “It drives me crazy,” he said. “I come here every year, it’s important for me to celebrate but not to provoke people. These are small children with no shepherd, it’s not Judaism,” he says. But voices such as his were drowned out by the banging of doors and racist chants.

In the days preceding Jerusalem Day, a war of flags broke out in Jerusalem. It began with the funeral of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which included the flying of Palestinian flags on the Temple Mount and in Palestinian neighborhoods. Jews responded with thousands of flags during the march, but also with huge flags hung on the old municipality and on the Chords Bridge at the entrance to Jerusalem.

The Old City walls were illuminated with Israeli flags as well. It seemed Israelis were winning this war. But then Palestinian activists managed to fly a drone carrying the Palestinian flag above the celebrants at Damascus Gate. This was no simple feat, requiring the evasion of police monitoring. Police managed to bring it down using technological methods, but it still amounted to a small Palestinian victory.

At the end of the day, at the time of this writing, Jerusalem Day ended in a relatively calm manner. It may be too early to say a blessing, since past experience shows that thugs will roam the streets of Jerusalem at night, looking for Palestinian victims.

In Sheikh Jarrah, stone throwing was intensifying. Hamas, as expected, did not launch a new round of hostilities and police managed to control most of the incidents without serious injuries. The marchers will return home and we’ll move on to the next story. It’s Shavuot soon, with people going to the Temple Mount amid more tension.

But what are the real implications of such a march? What imprint will it leave in the minds of thousands of youths who were fired up with racist and ultra-nationalist hatred? What imprint will it leave on Palestinian residents? At 8:30 P.M., outside Damascus Gate, the ground covered with plastic bottles, stickers and broken flag poles, with the last celebrants walking by, the future looked grim.

Features