Palestine.Resisting the occupation

07/11/2024

05/11/2024

Wave of attacks on towns and villages begins on Sunday night, with residents of Burqa noting Israelis destroyed ancient trees that were older than Israel itself

04/11/2024

04/11/2024

Keir Starmer, David Lammy: You claim Israel is an “important ally”, but the UK should not be an ally to atrocities. You must act now to protect Palestinians from extermination.

🔴 Take action to put pressure on the UK government: https://www.map.org.uk/campaigns/northern-gaza-under-siege-a-tell-your-mp-we-will-not-stay-silent-while-gaza-is-erased

04/11/2024

In arresting an Israeli Jewish professor, Haim Bresheeth, for supposedly supporting a "proscribed organisation" (Hamas), the Met have exposed their hand. There is a video of the speech given by Prof Bresheeth at an anti-genocide rally last week. We can all hear for ourselves that nothing he said contravened the draconian Terrorism Act.

Instead, he noted – quite correctly – that Israel cannot defeat Hamas or any of the other resistance movements opposed to its genocide in Gaza.

As so many others have observed, and history serves as our guide here, you cannot defeat an organisation created to struggle against your violence by engaging in more violence. Israel's genocide is the best recruiting sergeant Hamas could wish for.

Israel's strategy – assuming that it is actually trying to defeat Hamas – is entirely self-sabotaging. Pointing this out is not support for a proscribed organisation. It is simple historical analysis – something we all ought to be free to do. But arresting academics for doing it has a very dark pedigree indeed.

That is where we have arrived in Sir Keir Starmer's Britain.

Israel has smashed into oblivion the constraints of international law through the endless repetition of war crimes. Targeting children, babies, shelters, hospitals, universities, bakeries has been entirely normalised.

Now Israel's patrons such as the UK are tearing apart the rules of civil society – to normalise the arrest and persecution of anti-genocide protesters, journalists and academics.

Britain is a full partner with Israel, not only by arming and supporting a genocide of the Palestinian people, but by criminalising the right to protest against it, to speak out, to think for ourselves.

The Palestinians are in a fight for their very existence. We are in a parallel fight to stop the last vestiges of our freedoms being taken from us.

Watch Prof Bresheeth's speech here: https://skwawkbox.org/2024/11/03/exclusive-prof-haim-bresheeths-anti-genocide-speech-before-he-was-arrested-for-terrorism/

03/11/2024

More than a year in, death tolls that previously seemed unthinkable have become routine. Human rights lawyer and ex-IDF soldier Snir Klein, writes:

“In May 2023, the former legal advisor for the Shin Bet wrote that the strike on three Islamic Jihad commanders in Gaza, in which 10 civilians were killed, including 3 children, was an illegal attack. He was basing this decision on the Israeli defense establishment's own position in the investigation committee for the assassination of Salah Shehade in 2002.

Shehade led the military wing of Hamas at a time when it was killing hundreds of Israelis in su***de attacks.

In their opinion, the Shin Bet and IDF representatives said that they would not have attacked had they known about the presence of children at the scene.

And today, every day, we hear about an attack in which chilling numbers of civilians were killed. Dozens every day, displaced persons fleeing from place to place and heavy bombs dismantling and burning down their makeshift shelter.

And this evil formula, which uses tables and columns to calculate "collateral damage," swallows everything. Tens of thousands of corpses, thousands of dead children. This formula runs on a man-made machine which swallows all this death and spits out a green light in return.

It's no longer considered even a slight inconvenience; we are perpetrating mass death, and it doesn't even send ripples down souls, doesn't shake something in the heart, doesn't produce a scream.

And it goes on, and on, and the people who should be shouting "madness!" have suddenly gone silent, and every strike that was once seen as forbidden, as a horrific crime, is normalized. And there is no justification, nothing that was done to us could justify what we are doing.

And everything is done in a cold, calculated manner with tables and graphs, lawyers, and computers that work to justify everything. In normalizing and legalizing vengeance.”

03/11/2024

About 100 people were killed on Monday in an IDF strike on Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. The IDF said the building was bombed after 4 soldiers were killed by an IED nearby, and a “lookout” was detected on its roof. A 5-story building, around 200 people - bombed for a “lookout.”

About 20 of those who died in the bombing were children. Dozens were trapped under the rubble, some of whom were taking shelter after being driven out of the bombed areas of Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun. For a lookout. But what does the IDF mean when they say someone is a “lookout”?

A soldier who took part in the 2014 ground invasion of Gaza, told us how two women in an orchard were targeted and killed for allegedly being "lookouts," because they were seen "with cellphones, talking, walking" and it was assumed that they could see the forces.

“... They check the bodies, and it was two women [...] and they were unarmed. He came back and we moved on, and they were listed as terrorists. They were fired at – so of course, they must have been terrorists.”

Infantry | Southern Gaza Strip | 2014

We see the same posthumous branding of people as terrorists today, too.

“The feeling in the war room, and this is a softened version, was that every person we killed, we counted him as a terrorist,” one IDF officer told Oren Ziv for +972 Magazine in July.

The IDF also claimed the casualty numbers from Beit Lahia are unreliable and "do not match the information in the IDF's possession." The justifications never change, nor do the claims of inflated numbers of casualties, only the dates and locations do.

Children were wiped off the face of the earth, rescuers desperately worked to move rubble by hand, and the IDF responded that "a number of photos that were broadcast on media channels were published in the past and are unrelated to the current attack."
100% audacity, 0% shame.

We are seeing the results of years of dehumanization in which people are reduced to numbers. Reduced to "lookouts" killed in "precision strikes" with “conflicting reports” of mass "collateral damage." Just a few of the myriad phrases and concepts we use to try and clean our conscience.