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Escalation In Palestine – Hizbullah Is Ready To Join The Fight
The current war the occupiers of Palestine wage on the indigenous population has some unusual features.
While the conflict was, without doubt, started by the colonial occupiers the course of the recent escalation seems to be managed by the resistance side. It may well be part of a larger plan.
The Israeli army had for some time planned a large scale 30-days long maneuver to rehearse an attack on Hezbullah in Lebanon. Last week Hizbullah reacted to that:
The Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror organization has announced it is on high alert following the IDF’s launching of its largest-ever military exercise.
The IDF launched on Sunday its “Chariots of Fire” month-long exercise simulating war on several fronts, and primarily against Hezbollah in the north, including the massive firing of missiles and rockets from all arenas on the home front.
This is the largest and most comprehensive IDF maneuver in its history…
The maneuver had been announced for some time. Hizbullah has feared that the maneuver was a deception for a planned Israeli assault on Lebanon. It came at an interesting moment.
The International Day of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) was inaugurated by Imam Khomeini in 1979, the year of the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, to revive the Palestinian cause, and is celebrated on the last Friday of the month of Ramadan.
The last Friday of Ramadan was May 7. On May 5 the Secretary General of Hizbullah Hassan Nasrallah gave his yearly Al-Quds day speech:
[O]ur responsibility for Al-Quds Day is to provide all possible help to the Palestinian people, to the Palestinian Resistance; the Axis of Resistance must be even more united and attached to the cause, and it already is, it must increase its readiness (for the final war), it must strengthen itself further, because it is the Axis of Resistance that will shape the future of the Middle East.
If we follow the development of the current phase of the conflict in Palestine those words may getting a deeper meaning:
Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the three holiest sites in Islam, has long been an emblem of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
Al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), the complex in Jerusalem’s Old City that houses the mosque – which includes the Dome of the Rock and other Islamic shrines – is arguably the most significant symbol of Palestinian sovereignty.
Jerusalem has been on edge for weeks over Israel's restrictions on Palestinian access to parts of the Old City during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and Israeli authorities' attempted eviction of several Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood to make way for Israeli settlers.
Al-Aqsa found itself at the centre of a long weekend of violence from Friday, that left hundreds of people injured and led to a series of deadly rocket exchanges between the Israel military and Hamas in Gaza.
By Tuesday night, Israeli security forces had raided the holy site four times in five days.
On Friday May 7, Al-Quds day, the first protests at Al-Aqsa against the stealing of the houses in Sheikh Jarrah happened. They were also against the year's 'Death to Arabs' Flag March by ultra-zionist settlers through east Jerusalem which had been planned for Sunday May 9.
The settler march was called off but the protests and the raids on Al-Aqsa continued. By Monday night Israel security forces had stormed Al-Aqsa three times. According to the Palestinian Red Cross 305 Palestinians were injured and 228 others hospitalized including four in a critical condition.
On Monday the Israel military called off its “Chariots of Fire” exercise in the north to concentrate on a possible escalation of violence in Jerusalem.
That was the point where the resistance in the Gaza strip joined the conflict by launching missiles on Israeli settlements.
The move was not necessary. Gaza voluntarily entered the conflict. Presumably the resistance leadership in Gaza believes that it has the capabilities and backing to sustain a new round of fighting. Since then some 2,000 missiles were fired against Israeli targets as far away from Gaza as Tel Aviv, some 230 kilometers north of Gaza. This is a much greater range than previous missiles fired from Gaza have had. Only some 10-20% of the missiles fired reach their target. Some are caught by Israel's missiles defense but many of the locally produced weapons are not precise enough or simply fail. Still – the psychological effect on the colonial population is severe.
Israel immediately began to wage an air war on Gaza. As in previous rounds of the conflict it targeted the media, the police and civil infrastructure. These strikes are war crimes. They were accompanied by an assassination campaign against presumed resistance leaders.
On Monday May 10 another front opened up as anti-Jewish protests happened in Lod. Shops were damaged and cars set on fire. The next two night anti-Arab pogroms and anti-Jewish rioting escalated:
Israel on Wednesday experienced its worst night of internal Jewish-Arab chaos for many years, amid the ongoing armed conflict with Gaza, as scenes of unrest, rioting, hate rallies and growing social chaos spread throughout numerous cities, some of which were once seen as symbols of coexistence.
Violent confrontations erupted in Lod, Acre, Jerusalem, Haifa, Bat Yam, Tiberias and many other locations, with people injured, some of them seriously, leading Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce he was looking at deploying the military inside towns to restore order.
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Jewish mobs were seen roaming the streets of Tiberias and Haifa looking for Arabs to assault.
In Jerusalem, an Arab was stabbed by Jews and seriously injured at the Mahane Yehuda market.
“Death to Arabs” was heard in many locations of Jewish rallies.
Meanwhile, in Acre, a Jewish man was assaulted by Arab rioters and hit with rocks and iron bars, and was hospitalized in critical condition.
Arab rioting was reported in Jerusalem, Lod, Haifa, Tamra and elsewhere.
The Israeli military has called up reserves and moved forces down south to the boarder with Gaza. Today the Gaza resistance used for the first time suicide drones against Israeli missile defenses. Israeli troop concentrations around Gaza will have to fear that new weapon.
The Israeli government under still Prime Minister Netanyahoo is now threatening a ground invasion of Gaza. But ground assaults always cause casualties within the attacking forces, something the Israelis are usually keen to avoid. It will take more missiles fired from Gaza to goad Netanyahoo into launching such an attack.
Despite the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the Gaza strip the resistance forces there seems to be well supplied. They may well have more capabilities than is currently assumed.
With unrest in Jerusalem, pogroms in Israeli cities, a potential third intifada in the occupied West Bank and a ground invasion of Gaza the Israeli army will be very busy. If it comes to that during the next few days the time could be right for Hizbullah, already on full alarm, to step in and to attack the occupation on the grounds that it is holding.
Nasrallah's speech last week can be understood as an announcement of such a step:
My last message will be for the Israelis themselves. I tell them this: you know well, in your heart of hearts, whether it is based on your religious texts or doctrines, on your books or your prophecies, and also based on what some of your leaders and experts say, and also some of your religious authorities, you know (very well) that this entity (Israel) has no future, that it is on the verge of extinction and that it has little time left to live, very little time. Therefore, in this battle you are wasting your energy, and your young people are wasting their youth and their blood, in vain and to no avail.
…
We believe in this near future (where Israel won’t exist anymore), we believe in it very firmly, and this faith is not based only on religious and ideological bases, but is based (above all) on the data, on the events which occur, especially on those of the last decades, the last years and on what will happen (soon) in this region.
It is possible that Netanyahoo had planned the original escalation in Jerusalem to stay in office:
After four elections Israel still has no new government. Prime Minister Netanyahoo is on trial for corruption. A larger war that can be spun into a victory could help him to avoid a judgment and gain votes for the likely soon coming next election.
It that was his plan he has achieved a first step towards it:
Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett has taken “off the table” the option of forming a government without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, due to the ongoing military conflict with Gaza terrorists, a political source says.
Bennett has renewed his negotiations with Likud due to the emergency situation, and teams from both parties met today, the source says on condition of anonymity.
But it is not Netanyahoo who can decide when the missiles from Gaza will stop flying. It is not Netanyahoo who can control the Palestinian youth. The escalation dominance is not in his hands but in the hands of the resistance. It is the resistance that decides when the conflict ends.
Ali @allushiii_new – 18:19 UTC · May 13, 2021
Bismillahhhh
3 rockets fired from Lebanon into Palestine
The Daily Star in Lebanon confirmed tonight's rocket strike. If Israel reacts to that provocation as it usually does a war in its north could soon become reality. It would not be a small one.
Ansar Allah, the Houthi led movement in Yemen, has offered to join a fight against the colonists. It is well know for its long range surprise capabilities and these may at one point be used in the fight.
While I am still not sure that all of this is part of a plan – from Hizbullah's speech, over unrest in Jerusalem, Gaza missiles, pogroms, to now missiles from Lebanon – it surely looks like a well rehearsed and coordinated (re-)action of the resistance front.
General Qasem Soleimani's plans are coming to fruition.
From behind the NYT paywall, now some Zionists, like Peter Beinart, finally think the Palestinians have the right to return.
Palestinian Refugees Deserve to Return Home. Jews Should Understand.
By Peter Beinart
May 12, 2021
Mr. Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer who focuses on politics and foreign policy, is an editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.
Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.
Among Palestinians, Nakba is a household word. But for Jews — even many liberal Jews in Israel, America and around the world — the Nakba is hard to discuss because it is inextricably bound up with Israel’s creation. Without the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Zionist leaders would have had neither the land nor the large Jewish majority necessary to create a viable Jewish state. As I discuss at greater length in an essay for Jewish Currents from which this guest essay is adapted, acknowledging and beginning to remedy that expulsion — by allowing Palestinian refugees to return — requires imagining a different kind of country, where Palestinians are considered equal citizens, not a demographic threat.
To avoid this reckoning, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies insist that Palestinian refugees abandon hope of returning to their homeland. This demand is drenched in irony, because no people in human history have clung as stubbornly to the dream of return as have Jews. Establishment Jewish leaders denounce the fact that Palestinians pass down their identity as refugees to their children and grandchildren. But Jews have passed down our identity as refugees for 2,000 years. In our holidays and liturgy we continually mourn our expulsion and express our yearning for return. “After being forcibly exiled from their land,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion.” If keeping faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn Palestinians for doing the same thing?
In addition to telling Palestinians they cannot go home because they have been away too long, Jewish leaders argue that return is impractical. But this too is deeply ironic because, as a refugee rights advocate, Lubnah Shomali, has pointed out, “If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people and settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.” At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, Israel took in about 500,000 immigrants. If millions of diaspora Jews began moving to Israel tomorrow, Jewish leaders would not say taking them in was logistically impossible. They would help Israel to do what it has done before: build large amounts of housing fast.
When most Jews imagine Palestinian refugees’ return, they probably don’t envision it looking like Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they predict Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. But the tragic reality is that not many Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since it is believed that only a few thousand remain intact. Ms. Shomali estimates that more than 70 percent of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. And the Palestinian activists and scholars who envision return generally argue that large-scale eviction is neither necessary, nor desirable. Asked in 2000 about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes, the famed Palestinian literary critic Edward Said declared that he was “averse to the notion of people leaving their homes” and that “some humane and moderate solution should be found where the claims of the present and the claims of the past are addressed.”
None of this means refugee return would be simple or uncontested. Efforts at historical justice rarely are. But there is a reason the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations for segregation and slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that forced many Black Americans into foreclosure in the first decade of the 21st century. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past. That’s also the lesson of the evictions that have set Israel-Palestine aflame. More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state. Now they are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city. By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensure that the Nakba continues.
Perhaps American Jewish leaders fear that facing the crimes committed at Israel’s birth will leave Jews vulnerable. Once the Nakba taboo is lifted, Palestinians will feel emboldened to seek revenge. But more often than not, honestly confronting the past has the opposite effect.
After George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor, wrote about the house in Jerusalem that his grandfather had built and been robbed of, a former Israeli soldier who had lived in it contacted him unexpectedly. “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in it and I cannot deny it,” the former soldier said when they met, and then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” Mr. Bisharat later wrote that he was inspired to match the Israeli’s humanity.
“Just that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring itself to apologize to the Palestinians,” he wrote. In that moment he saw “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples.”
There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former soldier: “teshuvah.” It is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. That means the return of Palestinian refugees — far from necessitating Jewish exile — could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life.
“The occupier and myself — both of us suffer from exile,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer Jews deny the Nakba, the deeper our moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter, and is editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.
Posted by: Paul | May 15 2021 2:42 utc | 203
@204 Paul
I just read the essay by Taxi that you linked a little while ago. My God, what an essay!
And I just read your comment here with the re-post of the NYT opinion piece, and I thought, what a meshing of views here, the overarching theme in the culture of the world now, that Palestine has the right to defend itself. When for so long, we all thought that this right was Israel’s alone, and now the world begins to see it reversed – as it always was.
Anyway, I came back to talk about Taxi’s article and had to scout back – I’m so pleased to find it was you who provided that link. Here it is again, and I recommend this article as perhaps the most profound view of the Levantine situation currently available to us:
Palestine Has the Right to Defend Itself
“From here on, the death of Israel is no longer a far-fetched fantasy. From here on, the Palestinian Resistance will take charge of Palestine’s destiny. And its destiny is total liberation.
Whether this liberation takes place in a day, in a week, in a month or a year, the gates of liberation are now open, and nobody on earth can close them.”
This major commentary by Taxi, a much respected voice of the Levant, sets us down profoundly into the meaning of the facts on the ground. After decades of oppression, “Palestine Lives!” as Taxi recounts. Nothing in the people has been lost, the spirit to repel the invader and occupier is alive as ever, and Palestine is stronger than ever.
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Yet, this is not the main thrust of Taxi’s essay, which looks mostly to the USA and asks that empire, itself dying, to consider if it should any longer support the dying Israel, or if it should act from true realpolitik and abandon this lost cause, soon to be dead:
“The crux of the matter is that Empire now finds itself supporting a dying horse in the guise of Israel and there is no more medicine to be found for the horse. As any sound rancher would tell you: stop the hugging and start digging a grave for your four-legged pal. If Americans really believe that they are ‘the good guy’, then they should start acting like it and start making funeral arrangements for Israel before its dead belly bloats and festers in the sun.”
And in between the first quote here and the second quote lies the body of Taxi’s examination. Taxi says that the US had three main reasons for supporting Israel:
1. Unconditional support for Israel beginning with the Johnson administration and lasting to this day.
2. A showcase state for US weapon sales.
3. The “victim” status.
Taxi examines each of these three reasons and show them all to be expired by now – each now very defunct. As a pragmatic empire, Taxi suggests, the US should abandon this mule no longer able to work.
I don’t know who Taxi is. I think I’ve heard that she’s a woman, but I don’t know – I am a latecomer to this voice. I do know respect when I encounter it, and respect for Taxi is universal throughout our circles. And one has only to read the words to understand this.
I’m not sure the quotes here do the essay justice – I encourage those interested to read it for themselves.
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I believe that what Taxi suggests could happen and should happen is what will happen, in fact. The US will write Israel off as no longer productive, and the region, with its Resistance and with Palestine proudly in the lead as the standard bearer, will end the tenure of Israel as a state.
And all this, sooner than seems possible today.
I also think – bolstered by the opinion from the NYT cited by Paul above, that the Palestinian people will prove compassionate to their tormentors in a measure that seems impossible, and yet which comes readily to the living heart of true humans.
Posted by: Grieved | May 15 2021 4:35 utc | 208
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