.
![Intimidation in Gaza | by Robert Croma]()
![Enforcing an Occupation #2 | by Robert Croma]()
Enforcing an Occupation #2. IDF soldiers search the alleyways of the Occupied Territories. "The image is a blow-up of a contact print. I don't have access to the negatives.": image via Robert Croma, 19 November 2012
Israel bristles at U.S. suggestion it used excessive force to confront Palestinian stabbings: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 15 October 2015
U.S. 'excessive force' comment touches nerve in Israel: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 15 October 2015
Israelis invest in firepower as knife attacks rise: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
#Israeli border guards stand at a roadblock set up on a road close to Jabal Mukaber. #AFP @gharabli_ahmadi: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 15 October 2015
#Palestinians Clashes with Israeli security forces near the Jewish settlement of Beit El: #AFP by Abbas Momani: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY 12 October 2015
Fed up and angry, Generation Oslo leads Palestinian unrest: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
Israelis didn't know about the Palestinians' suffering beyond the dark mountains a half an hour away. For the most part, they didn’t want to know: Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 15 October 2015
What did you think, the Palestinians would sit still indefinitely? Did you really think Israel would continue on its course and they’d just bow their heads in submission?
Do you know many historical examples of that? Is there one example of a brutal occupation that persisted without stoking resistance? Apparently that's what you thought, otherwise there would have been public pressure long ago to act, because who wants terror?
But Israel slid into a deathly silence, with darkness over the abyss, and now it’s acting surprised. It voted for the right, for ultra-nationalism, racism and messianism, and now its feelings are hurt.
After all, what did it ask for but some quiet, to be left alone from the occupation to which it’s not even linked, and from the resistance that has fallen on it like a natural disaster. Sleeping beauty has awakened to the sound of stabbings and car-rammings, and through the cobwebs of sleep it’s asking: How did this happen? How can they be doing this to us again?
You can’t blame Israelis -- they were busy doing other things and knew nothing. Bar Refaeli’s wedding weighed heavily on people’s minds, as did events at the Allenby 40 nightclub. Israelis didn’t know exactly what was going on over there, beyond the dark mountains, half an hour’s drive from their homes -- for the most part, they didn’t want to know.
The media gladly succumbed to their wishes. They hid the crimes of the occupation from people’s sight -- such pictures don’t buoy ratings. The image of a Palestinian as a human being doesn’t sell newspapers. The media never reported what those people go through and what they really desire. It sufficed with diversions, incitement and propaganda. That pays better.
Politicians promised that everything would be fine, rabbis incited, settlers torched, the whole world is against us, just leave us alone. Then out of the blue those knife-wielding youngsters with murder in their eyes descended upon us. The quiet dissolved, security fizzled, businesses collapsed, dreams of jeep tours and quick vacations became uncertain.
The government blames the Islamic State and the left blames the lack of “peace talks.” Experts on Arab affairs — the southern branch of the Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence -- say it’s because of “incitement.” The wise sages of security issues say, as is their wont, that this time the other side must be hit hard. Everyone agrees that the Arabs are to blame because they were born to kill. Through this stupefying haze all connection to reality has been lost.
In the meantime, Jerusalem has become the capital of apartheid. No other city so discriminates and dispossesses or is so violent. Gun-toting Mayor Nir Barkat, who’s largely responsible for the discrimination and dispossession in his city, incites against a third of its population -- an unbelievable phenomenon in its own right.
And you thought 300,000 people would acquiesce? That they’d watch settlers invade their homes as city hall denied them minimal services amid maximal property taxes? That they’d look on while the occupier arbitrarily denied them residence status, as if they were migrants in their own city?
That they would put up with Jewish gangs beating them up in full view of policemen and forgive? That a young man growing up in this reality -- with his neighborhood a Soweto -- would spend his life washing dishes and building homes for Jews with no chance of escaping his ghetto?
Did you really think right-wing provocations on the Temple Mount would pass quietly? That the burning of the Dawabsheh family would pass with no response -- even more so the defense minister’s arrogant claims that Israel knew who the perpetrators were but wouldn’t arrest them?
That their children would be burned helplessly with Israel not punishing anyone and they’d remain silent? That the response to all this would be more of the same: We’ll demolish, detain, dispossess, oppress, torture and kill more than ever -- and (Jewish) Zion will be redeemed? Did anyone really believe that?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
![Embedded image permalink]()
View of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City. #AFP Photo by @gharabli_ahmad: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY 15 October 2015
Palestinian communities and Israeli settlements in#Jerusalem: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 15 October 2015
Israel sets up east Jerusalem checkpoints after violence spikes: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
Israel sets up checkpoints in Palestinian east Jerusalem: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
![The clashes lasted until the night. Israeli soldiers also use rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Street clashes in Deheishe camp, Bethlehem, between protestors and IOF forces following the October 14 funeral of Mutaz Ibrahim Zawahreh, 27, shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes the day before during a protest in front of the Separation WalI: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![The clashes lasted until the night. Israeli soldiers also use rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Street clashes in Deheishe camp, Bethlehem, between protestors and IOF forces following the October 14 funeral of Mutaz Ibrahim Zawahreh, 27, shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes the day before during a protest in front of the Separation WalI: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![Thousands attend the funeral. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Thousands attend the funeral: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October
![Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed since the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed during the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed since the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed during the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![‘We are so sad. He was my friend. The Israeli soldiers do not see us as humans.’, says a young Palestinian who attended the funeral. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
‘We are so sad. He was my friend. The Israeli soldiers do not see us as humans’, says a young Palestinian who attended the funeral.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![The Israeli army used scores of tear gas canisters, at times covering the Al-Azzeh refugee camp with clouds of tear gas. Some of the tear gas were shot directly at the head level of the protesters. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
![An angry crowd carries the body of Mutaz through the narrow streets of Deheishe. The camp was established in 1949, and is overcrowded, with 13,000 Palestinian refugees. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
An angry crowd carries the body of Mutaz through the narrow streets of Deheishe. The camp was established in 1949, and is overcrowded, with 13,000 Palestinian refugees.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
![An angry crowd carries the body of Mutaz through the narrow streets of Deheishe. The camp was established in 1949, and is overcrowded, with 13,000 Palestinian refugees. (Photo: Anne Paq)]()
Intimidation in Gaza. Israeli Defense Force soldiers interrogate a Palestinian youth in Gaza with a tear gas launcher. The Palestinians were being forced to open their shops, which were closed in protest against the Israeli invasion into Palestinian territory. "The image is a blow-up of a contact print. I don't have access to the negatives.": image via Robert Croma, 18 November 2012
What do you actually want?
Do you want to pass on the old torture
Do you really want to be the new Gestapo
Well then I too want,
And I want to help lead them as a free people
Do you really want to outdo
those who trod you down
a generation ago
into your own blood
and into your own excrement
Do you want to pass on the old torture
to others now
in all its bloody and dirty detail
with all the brutal delight of torturers
as suffered by your fathers?
Do you really want to be the new Gestapo
the new Wehrmacht
the new SA and SS
and turn the Palestinians
into the new Jews?
Well then I too want,
having fifty years ago
myself been tormented for being a Jewboy
by your tormentors,
to be a new Jew with these new Jews
you are making of the Palestinians
And I want to help lead them as a free people
into their own land of Palestine
from whence you have driven them or in which you plague them
you apprentices of the Swastika
you fools and changelings of history
whose Star of David on your flags
turns ever quicker
into that damned symbol with its four feet
that you just do not want to see
but whose path you are following today
Erich Fried (1921-1988): A Jew to Zionist Fighters, 1988, from Unverwundenes - Liebe, Trauer, Widersorüche - Gedichte (Uninjured -Love, Grief, Contradictions - Poems), Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1988; English version by Frank Monahan from Return, March 1990
Erich Fried (1921-1988): A Jew to Zionist Fighters, 1988, from Unverwundenes - Liebe, Trauer, Widersorüche - Gedichte (Uninjured -Love, Grief, Contradictions - Poems), Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 1988; English version by Frank Monahan from Return, March 1990
Enforcing an Occupation #2. IDF soldiers search the alleyways of the Occupied Territories. "The image is a blow-up of a contact print. I don't have access to the negatives.": image via Robert Croma, 19 November 2012
Israel bristles at U.S. suggestion it used excessive force to confront Palestinian stabbings: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 15 October 2015
U.S. 'excessive force' comment touches nerve in Israel: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 15 October 2015
Israelis invest in firepower as knife attacks rise: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
#Israeli border guards stand at a roadblock set up on a road close to Jabal Mukaber. #AFP @gharabli_ahmadi: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 15 October 2015
Palestinian protesters are seen during clashes with Israeli soldiers near Bureij. #AFP @m55baba: image via Aurelia BAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 15 October 2015
#Palestinians Clashes with Israeli security forces near the Jewish settlement of Beit El: #AFP by Abbas Momani: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY 12 October 2015
Gideon Levy: Sleeping beauty has awakened
Fed up and angry, Generation Oslo leads Palestinian unrest: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
Israelis didn't know about the Palestinians' suffering beyond the dark mountains a half an hour away. For the most part, they didn’t want to know: Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 15 October 2015
What did you think, the Palestinians would sit still indefinitely? Did you really think Israel would continue on its course and they’d just bow their heads in submission?
Do you know many historical examples of that? Is there one example of a brutal occupation that persisted without stoking resistance? Apparently that's what you thought, otherwise there would have been public pressure long ago to act, because who wants terror?
But Israel slid into a deathly silence, with darkness over the abyss, and now it’s acting surprised. It voted for the right, for ultra-nationalism, racism and messianism, and now its feelings are hurt.
After all, what did it ask for but some quiet, to be left alone from the occupation to which it’s not even linked, and from the resistance that has fallen on it like a natural disaster. Sleeping beauty has awakened to the sound of stabbings and car-rammings, and through the cobwebs of sleep it’s asking: How did this happen? How can they be doing this to us again?
You can’t blame Israelis -- they were busy doing other things and knew nothing. Bar Refaeli’s wedding weighed heavily on people’s minds, as did events at the Allenby 40 nightclub. Israelis didn’t know exactly what was going on over there, beyond the dark mountains, half an hour’s drive from their homes -- for the most part, they didn’t want to know.
The media gladly succumbed to their wishes. They hid the crimes of the occupation from people’s sight -- such pictures don’t buoy ratings. The image of a Palestinian as a human being doesn’t sell newspapers. The media never reported what those people go through and what they really desire. It sufficed with diversions, incitement and propaganda. That pays better.
Politicians promised that everything would be fine, rabbis incited, settlers torched, the whole world is against us, just leave us alone. Then out of the blue those knife-wielding youngsters with murder in their eyes descended upon us. The quiet dissolved, security fizzled, businesses collapsed, dreams of jeep tours and quick vacations became uncertain.
The government blames the Islamic State and the left blames the lack of “peace talks.” Experts on Arab affairs — the southern branch of the Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence -- say it’s because of “incitement.” The wise sages of security issues say, as is their wont, that this time the other side must be hit hard. Everyone agrees that the Arabs are to blame because they were born to kill. Through this stupefying haze all connection to reality has been lost.
In the meantime, Jerusalem has become the capital of apartheid. No other city so discriminates and dispossesses or is so violent. Gun-toting Mayor Nir Barkat, who’s largely responsible for the discrimination and dispossession in his city, incites against a third of its population -- an unbelievable phenomenon in its own right.
And you thought 300,000 people would acquiesce? That they’d watch settlers invade their homes as city hall denied them minimal services amid maximal property taxes? That they’d look on while the occupier arbitrarily denied them residence status, as if they were migrants in their own city?
That they would put up with Jewish gangs beating them up in full view of policemen and forgive? That a young man growing up in this reality -- with his neighborhood a Soweto -- would spend his life washing dishes and building homes for Jews with no chance of escaping his ghetto?
Did you really think right-wing provocations on the Temple Mount would pass quietly? That the burning of the Dawabsheh family would pass with no response -- even more so the defense minister’s arrogant claims that Israel knew who the perpetrators were but wouldn’t arrest them?
That their children would be burned helplessly with Israel not punishing anyone and they’d remain silent? That the response to all this would be more of the same: We’ll demolish, detain, dispossess, oppress, torture and kill more than ever -- and (Jewish) Zion will be redeemed? Did anyone really believe that?
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
View of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City. #AFP Photo by @gharabli_ahmad: image via AureliaBAILLY @AureliaBAILLY 15 October 2015
Palestinian communities and Israeli settlements in#Jerusalem: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 15 October 2015
Israel sets up east Jerusalem checkpoints after violence spikes: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
Israel sets up checkpoints in Palestinian east Jerusalem: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 14 October 2015
Anne Paq: Funeral in Bethlehem
Street clashes in Deheishe camp, Bethlehem, between protestors and IOF forces following the October 14 funeral of Mutaz Ibrahim Zawahreh, 27, shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes the day before during a protest in front of the Separation WalI: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
Street clashes in Deheishe camp, Bethlehem, between protestors and IOF forces following the October 14 funeral of Mutaz Ibrahim Zawahreh, 27, shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes the day before during a protest in front of the Separation WalI: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
Thousands attend the funeral: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October
Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed during the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
Muntaz was the 30th Palestinian killed during the soaring of tensions and violence in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel since October 1st: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
‘We are so sad. He was my friend. The Israeli soldiers do not see us as humans’, says a young Palestinian who attended the funeral.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
The Israeli army used scores of tear gas canisters, at times covering the Al-Azzeh refugee camp with clouds of tear gas. Some of the tear gas canisters were shot directly at the head level of the protesters.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
An angry crowd carries the body of Mutaz through the narrow streets of Deheishe. The camp was established in 1949, and is overcrowded, with 13,000 Palestinian refugees.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015
An angry crowd carries the body of Mutaz through the narrow streets of Deheishe. The camp was established in 1949, and is overcrowded, with 13,000 Palestinian refugees.: photo by Anne Paq via Mondoweiss, 15 October 2015