In the United States, Our Task is Clear

This is my second trip to Palestine with Eyewitness Palestine, and this time the experience was more visceral, more emotional.

We mainly went to three areas – Hebron, the Bedouin settlements in the Naqab and some camps near Jerusalem. These were tough places.

In Hebron the settlers and soldiers hover like armed mosquitoes. In the Hebron hills, and the Naqab, families are on constant guard against home demolition, settler/soldier harassment and attack. The Naqab Bedouin village of Araqib has been demolished dozens of times and its leader is currently serving a ten-month sentence in Israeli jail. People live in tents or in their cars. Sometimes they sleep in the village cemetery, because the settlers and the soldiers will be less likely to invade.

Everywhere daily life is constrained by endless barriers: physical, bureaucratic, economic. It is a comprehensive plan, a form of incipient state violence, that denigrates the Palestinian nationality, and is designed to suck the life force out of the people.

Of course, it won’t; fascists never win in the long run. But it takes its toll.

Between my first trip in 2013 and now, things have gotten worse for the Palestinians, according to everyone we spoke with.

The Israelis have grown even more brazen in their desire to take over the West Bank. “Palestinians out, land in,” is how one of the activists from Grassroots Jerusalem described the government’s philosophy. Poll driven Israeli parties and candidates are moving to the right as hard as they can. Netanyahu is embracing racists/fascists such as the Kahanists.

The colonial settler ideology is being expressed without reservation or moral restraint. We don’t hear a mumbling word about two state solutions.

The international community, led by Trump, have given Israeli leadership the green light to go after what they have always wanted: a unitary Jewish state, with as few Palestinians as possible, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. Their goal is out there now for all to see.

The Palestinians will figure out the course of their movement. But in the US our task is clear. Publicize the situation far and wide, encourage unity between the Palestinians, and the People of Color and oppressed nationalities within the US, push our elected officials to resist the right wing’s efforts to Judaize the entire country, keep the Democrats from knuckling under (if possible), and materially support the Palestinian cause.

Victory is not assured, but if we do nothing, there will be even more suffering to come.