For how much longer?
How much longer?
“Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.
And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.” (Suheir Hammad)
The world watches as the new right-wing extremist, queer-hostile, blackmailing, and ultra-Zionist Israeli government under Netanyahu is inaugurated at the end of last December.
People out there are afraid. People fear the new government. I very much hope that people won’t have reason to be afraid. Unfortunately, I read the coalition agreements and understand the concerns.
“Everyone is rightly afraid,” said former Israeli Minister of Economy Orna Barbivai.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s new finance minister, announced last Sunday that he would confiscate the tax revenues of Palestinian government agencies and distribute them to the families of those affected by Palestinian
“terrorist acts” – this concerns 37.2 million euros.
That in itself is nothing new; Israel has regularly confiscated Palestinian tax revenues since 1967, but so far, Israel has feared that too much blackmail of Palestine could ideologically strengthen Hamas.
The new government apparently doesn’t care; because more Hamas attacks would likely only provide the new government with ideological justification for its extortion and apartheid.
The confiscation of Palestinian taxes is only one of five announced “punitive measures” against Palestine, which now come into effect as a perfidious act of revenge in response to the Palestinian government in Ramallah seeking help from the International Court of Justice in The Hague. According to the Israeli government, this request for help is part of a “legal-diplomatic war against Israel” by Palestine – asking for help with obvious human rights violations is thus “diplomatic terror”, interesting.
In addition to the tax confiscation, the special passports of several Palestinian diplomats were confiscated, without which it is nearly impossible for them to travel freely between the West Bank and Israel or abroad, thus their political participation is severely restricted – diplomatic war indeed.
Tamar Ben-Gvir, the new Minister of Public Security, incidentally ordered that all Palestinian flags be removed from public spaces.
Ben-Gvir also secured in the coalition agreement that the police is now subordinate to his ministry: This means where displaying the Palestinian flag in public was previously only prohibited “if there was a high probability that it would cause serious public disturbance”, there now seems to be a total taboo on the black-white-green flag, because according to Ben-Gvir, Palestinian flags per se “support terrorism”.
Closely united in hypocrisy
The renewed call to end the “ongoing occupation, settlement, and annexation of Palestinian territories” by clear decision of the UN General Assembly, previously also by the International Court of Justice, is calmly and arrogantly commented on by Netanyahu with: “Like hundreds of other twisted resolutions of the UN General Assembly against Israel, today’s resolution will also not bind the Israeli government” – translated, that means something like: screw your human rights, nothing happens to us anyway!
The accusation against Israel that they are committing apartheid against Palestinians is based on empirical facts and cannot be factually refuted; this was recently comprehensively addressed in the highly recommended Amnesty International report “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians”.
Does the accusation of anti-Semitism by mainstream media against any kind of Israel criticism still work when the world’s largest human rights organization clearly speaks of apartheid?
Luckily, representatives of the democratic world still have backbone and express
harsh criticism:
“Wishing you a steady hand and much success,” tweeted our chancellor – much success with apartheid, Netanyahu!
And what luck, Biden is “looking forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, with whom (he) has been friends for decades” – a close friendship in shitting on human rights.
Now more than ever; solidarity with the progressive forces of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
That means concretely: solidarity with the PLO, not Hamas in Gaza.