Today, there are over seven million Palestinian refugees worldwide. There is no one-state or two-state solution possible without Israel’s acceptance that all Palestinian exiles have a right of return, a right to live in what was the contours of historic Palestine.
Despite growing pressure for a ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently vowed to continue military operations in Gaza “until Hamas is destroyed.” Members of his political party also called for driving Palestinians out of Gaza in order to install Israeli settlers there after the war. It is clear that Israel is only interested in the colonization of the Palestinian territories and the elimination of the Palestinian people as a whole.
A deadly war on Palestinian journalists
The number of journalists killed in Gaza continues to rise. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), more than 100 media professionals have died since October 7 since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel according to Palestinian authorities, making it the deadliest conflict in recent history for the profession. Several NGOs are denouncing the deliberate targeting of journalists and are calling the Israeli army to account.
One per day. In two months of war, more than 69 reporters and media professionals have been killed in Gaza, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published on December 23, 2023. This represents one journalist, cameraman or fixer killed every day since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel on October 7, 2023 sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israeli soil.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which since the early 1990s has been keeping track of journalists killed in the exercise of their mission, published a report on Wednesday December 13, 2023 with the same conclusions: “The war in Gaza has already far more deaths among media professionals than in any other conflict.”
The two reports count “at least 64 journalists and media workers confirmed dead”, most of them Palestinians (57 of them), almost all killed in bombings in Gaza. CPJ also counts four Israeli journalists killed in attacks by Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023 as well as three Lebanese journalists killed by Israeli forces on Lebanon’s border with Israel.
These figures are much more alarmist than the latest report from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published Thursday, December 14, 2023 which lists “only” 17 journalists who lost their lives while doing their job in Gaza. This disparity between the figures of Reporters Without Borders and those of the IFJ and CPJ is explained by the fact that RSF only counts journalists arrested and killed in the exercise of their duties, and not all media professionals, who for example, lost their lives in the bombing of their home. CPJ also reports 13 journalists injured, 19 others arrested and three missing. It also reports multiple attacks, threats, cyberattacks, censorship and murders of family members of journalists.
Several testimonials and videos document this data. The latest, published on December 15, 2023 and quickly went viral, shows a journalist from Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency beaten while trying to work in occupied East Jerusalem. The scene, broadcast live by CNN Turk, shows photojournalist Mustafa al-Kharouf and independent reporter Faiz Abu Rmeleh being arrested and beaten by several members of the Israeli security forces on patrol.
During this filmed attack, a member of the Israeli security forces threatened to arrest the two journalists, who identified themselves by showing their press cards. An Israeli soldier appears to want to shoot the journalist with his assault rifle, but ultimately uses his weapon to hit him in the face. Mustafa Al-Kharouf was then thrown to the ground before being kicked in the chest and head.
The attack on the Anadolu photographer was condemned on Saturday by European Commission spokesperson Peter Stano. Israeli law enforcement officials involved have been suspended until the details of the incident are investigated, according to RSF reporting.
For Jonathan Dagher, head of RSF’s Middle East desk, “the fact that these police officers attacked reporters with such brutality, in front of cameras and witnesses, says a lot about the structural violence committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian reporters. “
Also, recently, a cameraman from the Qatari channel Al Jazeera was killed by an Israeli drone attack in the southern Gaza Strip. Samer Abou Daqa was reporting in a school in Khan Younes on Friday, December 15, 2023 when he was hit. Seriously injured, he remained for hours at the scene of the strike because, according to Al Jazeera, “Israeli forces prevented ambulances” from reaching there.
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed to have approved an access route for a Palestinian ambulance, but that it had chosen to take another route and found itself blocked. It also assured that it “never deliberately targeted journalists” and took “all possible operational measures to protect civilians and journalists”.
For Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh, injured in the arm in the strike that killed his colleague Samer Abou Daqa, “the [Israeli] occupation does not want the press, it deliberately targeted us”. “There was only the Al Jazeera team and Civil Defense in the sector,” he told AFP on Saturday, December 16, 2023 while attending the funeral of his colleague, a few weeks after losing his wife and two of his children in a bombing.
Open-air prison
As recently as July 2023, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, declared:
“The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has transformed the West Bank, like Gaza, into an open-air prison for Palestinians. Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces and many have been incarcerated for long periods, often presumed guilty without proof. What’s more, these offenses appear to be part of a plan to ‘de-Palestinize’ the territory. This threatens the existence of the Palestinian people as a cohesive national group. It is essential that the international community recognizes the illegality of the Israeli occupation. »
Unfortunately, for a long time, world opinion has lost interest in the Palestinian question. Francesca Albanese adds: “Through a range of physical, bureaucratic and digital mechanisms, the Israeli regime has transformed the occupied territory into a ‘panopticon’, where Palestinians are constantly monitored and disciplined. “This lady even goes so far as to declare that, due to the way Israel treats the Palestinians, this country “was guilty of the crime of apartheid and functioning as a colonial state”.
Moreover, it is often said of Gaza and more generally of Palestine that it is an open-air prison… Yes, and it is not a simple metaphor. Palestine perfectly illustrates what Michel Foucault calls the “carceral continuum”: imprisonment and surveillance can take many forms. It is extremely important to talk about Palestinian prisoners, but we must also keep in mind that when we talk about abolition, our target is not just the prison, but more generally the “prison mentality”.
Every day, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, Israeli forces use systematic violence against Palestinians. Every day, dozens of innocent Palestinians are killed, especially women and children. This persecution, this killing against the Palestinians, is a pogrom to forcefully abandon the territories of Palestine and expand the illegal colonies which will be populated by Israeli settlers.
Two far-right members of the Israeli government coalition, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, said Israel had the right to build settlements anywhere in the West Bank: “We will not compromise on any hill, on no outpost. It’s ours. “
Israelis are systematically demolishing Palestinian homes on a large scale. Olive and date plantations are bulldozed. The right to water and sanitation is no longer granted. UN experts say the destruction of homes should be considered “domicide, amounting to a war crime”.
The United Nations, in a press release on the toll of the large-scale military operation carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces from July 3 to 5 this year in the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank, cost the lives killed 12 Palestinians and injured 144 others, damaging and destroying a large number of Palestinian homes and basic infrastructure, in particular, sewage facilities.
Apartheid crime
The United Nations permanent observer said that “the Israeli government is a settler government, run by the settlers and for the settlers.” He accused Israel of having annexed entire swaths of Palestinian territory and confining Palestinians to isolated enclaves, with the aim of amassing as much Palestinian land as possible with a minimum of Palestinians. He continues:
“If Israel can build settlements and destroy Palestinian homes without consequences, it will continue to do so. The settlers continue their abuses against the homes and crops of Palestinian families because no one will hold them responsible and because no one is offering the Palestinian people the international protection they deserve. “
Amnesty International says that the Israeli authorities have continued to impose on the Palestinian population, in Israel and the occupied territories, an oppressive and discriminatory regime which constitutes a system of apartheid, a crime enshrined in international law. The number of Palestinians killed illegally in the West Bank has increased. The practice of torture and other forms of ill-treatment continued.
These inhumane acts – massive seizures of land and property, homicides, serious injuries, forced transfers, arbitrary restrictions on freedom of movement, deprivation of the right to a nationality – constitute the crime of apartheid, a crime against humanity. Andre Brink, one of the great South African writers, in his memoirs, recounts his visit to Palestine:
“I cannot remove from my mind the memory of the terrible remains of Dachau and Auswitz. While Israel never engaged in genocide on the scale of the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing that this nation inflicts on the Palestinians amounts, morally, to a slow, minor version of the death camps. I find it difficult to understand how a people for whom it was so difficult to recover from the horrors of the Holocaust can then inflict on others what was done to them. “
In 1947, the UN passed Resolution 181 to end the British mandate in Palestine – to divide Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and the other Jewish, and to place Jerusalem under international rule. What do we see today? An independent Jewish state and the remains of territories under the yoke of the Jews who expel, every day, from their territory, families who have lived there for centuries. And who are qualified by the West as terrorists? Not the Jews who kill Palestinian women and children every day. But the Palestinians who are trying to fight back. We are in the middle of an upside-down world.
The Oslo Accords assassinated
From 1991, discussions took place between Palestinians and Israelis in Oslo which resulted in agreements nicknamed the Oslo Accords. These agreements were signed in 1993 at the White House by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. But two years later, Rabin was assassinated. This is the death of the Oslo Accords. The Israeli nationalist far right is doing everything to torpedo the agreements. Benyamin Netanyahu comes to power. All communication links between the two peoples are cut. Little by little, the Palestinian problem is fading from the radar of international diplomacy and the media. No major power is making the effort to revive negotiations. For these great diplomats, since we no longer talk about this problem, it is resolved.
Soon, President Donald Trump found a way to break the little Arab solidarity that still remained, by proposing the Abraham Accords which should seal the rapprochement between Israel and several Arab countries. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and soon, Saudi Arabia. These agreements are a gift to Israel, without compensation. Rapid annexation will be replaced by creeping and progressive annexation, without there being any difference in nature. They represent a betrayal of the Palestinian cause, as has always been the case on the part of Arab leaders. This allows American power to disengage and encourage Arab states to counter Iranian power. This is what we could call American subcontracting of the Iranian problem. These agreements demonstrate the desire of the United States to isolate Iran, to unite the Gulf States and Israel around the “Iranian threat”.
The outcome of these agreements is that the United Arab Emirates have invested massively in Israel in strategic sectors such as medicine, high technologies and health. This deprives these young Arab intellectuals of obtaining money to do research that would benefit Arabs. Commenting on these agreements, Hani Al-Masri, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research said: “All that will remain of this agreement is generous financial support, and the Palestinian leaders will, in approving, sold the cause for a few dirhams. “
Need to rebel
When a people systematically suffers the bullying, the persecution, the homicides that we have exposed, for almost a century, when, in Gaza, more than 2.5 million people live in, what the UN rapporteur called, “an open-air prison” when, in the West Bank, the population finds itself isolated by walls which prevent one section of the population from having access to others of the same population – a wall which has been nicknamed the wall of apartheid, segregation, shame, nine meter high walls – sometimes these people feel the need to revolt.
This is what happened in October 7, 2023 with Hamas’s assault on Israeli-held territory. This attack is unprecedented in the history of the Palestinian conflict. This is an attack that Israel has never experienced. The powerful intelligence machine of the State of Israel and its sophisticated defense mechanisms could do nothing to prevent this incursion. Iron Dome, the best anti-missile defense system in the world, was unable to stop the saturation of missiles launched at Israel. The security barrier supposed to protect the country from attacks has proven to be fallible. Hamas was able to inflict considerable damage on Israel: 1300 dead, two thousand injured, 240 Israelis taken hostage.
Western countries, naturally, have expressed their “unconditional support” for Israel. We had to see Macron, Biden, Sunak, Von der Lyen, condemning these “acts of terrorism”. When acts of terrorism are perpetrated daily against the Palestinians by Israel, we see no protests. For the West, the Hamas attack is barbarism. But nobody says that it is the Israeli government which created this barbarity through its daily acts of violence on Palestinians and that these Palestinian people have only expressed their exasperation.
Open the path for peace
The history of Palestine and the Palestinians is marked by war, expulsion, loss and exile, as well as a liberation struggle that has now lasted almost a century.
The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the war that followed was felt by the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine as a Nakba, a catastrophe in which hundreds of thousands of people lost their houses, their possessions and their homes.
The number of victims continues to grow. With violence, it is death, injuries, bruised flesh, chaos, the breath of destroyed buildings, then hatred, resentment which darken the future. The new phase of the Israeli military operation only amplifies this carnage. The 22,000 lives destroyed, as we write these lines, by the Hamas violent operation in Israel and the Israeli bombings on Gaza, not to mention the thousands of injured people who will die and those traumatized, are already a tragedy.
The “legitimate right to defend oneself”, even after an inexcusable large-scale Islamist Hamas attack, cannot be, and must not be, a collective punishment for 2 million people who have been living in an open-air prison for seventeen years.
This war, in this theater of the Middle East as elsewhere, is the failure of politics. To say this is not to find a pretext for the heinous act of Hamas. The war gear will only swell the ranks of Hamas or other much more extremist and nihilistic political currents such as Islamic Jihad.
Gaza, this land without hope, subject to the cynical political manipulations of the Israeli occupier, Palestinian political impasses and Arab or Western complicity, will not recover from this new cycle. The UN has been warning for several years about this blockaded territory where deprivations of basic necessities and violence are structural.
Dehumanizing the Palestinians, because the inhabitants of Gaza are Palestinians, who have no right to any voice or perspective, is the worst strategy. This people, eminently political, has a memory and will refuse a new exile or an ethnic cleansing which does not speak its name. This Palestinian people affirms, like a large part of world opinion which has experienced or is still experiencing the horrors of colonialism and its impacts, that a Palestinian life is worth as much as an Israeli life.
The far-right government led by Netanyahu is deeply entangled in a violent offensive in Gaza. But for what purpose? Eradicate Hamas? Push the Egyptians to open the Rafah gate and welcome 2 million Gazans? Occupy northern Gaza ad vitam aeternam?
Eradicating freedom fighters by raining bombs and missiles on a civilian population has never worked. Even the Americans, who have tried it many times, recognize that it only causes more chaos and gives rise to even more formidable terrorist hydras.
You can follow Professor Mohamed Chtatou on Twitter/X: @Ayurinu
