MAY 16,
2018
Two
spectacles unfolded in Palestine on Monday. In Gaza, Israeli army snipers
shot and killed 58 Palestinians—including six children—and injured almost three
thousand others amid scenes of smoke, fire, teargas, dust, agony and
blood. At exactly the same time, to the tinkling of champagne glasses at
a glittering reception barely fifty miles away in Jerusalem, Jared Kushner and
an elegant Ivanka Trump oversaw the opening of Donald Trump’s new embassy
there. The juxtaposition of these two contemporaneous scenes encapsulates
at a single glance the entirety of Zionism’s murderous conflict with the
Palestinian people.
The
Palestinians targeted and executed one-by-one by Israeli snipers had gathered
to demand their right of return to their lands and homes inside the rest of
Palestine, from the coastal plain up to and including Jerusalem. They or
their parents or grandparents were driven from their homes during the Zionist
ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 for the simple reason that they are not
Jewish: too many non-Jews in the putative Jewish state would not make for much
of a Jewish state after all. (“There could be no Jewish state with a
large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such
state. It would not be able to exist,” the Israeli historian Benny Morris
bluntly pointed out in an interview justifying ethnic cleansing with the
newspaper Ha’aretz in 2004; “a Jewish state would not have
come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians . . . [therefore]
it was necessary to uproot them”). They have been denied the right to
return to their homes ever since for the same reason: they are not Jewish, and
their presence would upset the carefully-engineered demographic tables
maintained by the state to preserve its tenuous claim to an exclusively Jewish
identity. The maintenance of that demographic balance and the suspension
of their political and human rights are inseparable from one another: the one
enables, produces and requires the other.
The
demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University is the architect of the current
isolation of Gaza. In 2004, he advised the government of Ariel Sharon to
withdraw Israeli forces from within Gaza, seal the territory off from the
outside world, and simply shoot anyone who tries to break out. “When 2.5
million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human
catastrophe,” Sofer told an interviewer in the Jerusalem Post (11
November 2004); “Those people will become even bigger animals than they are
today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at
the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if
we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day,
every day.” He added that “the only thing that concerns me is how to
ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be
able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
