Today:
Extended Radio Podcast (KPFK.org, 90.7FM)
at
11:30 pm Palestine time
4:30 pm US EDT
1:30 pm US PDT
The Violence of Apartheid: Israel’s Continuing Assault in Palestine
Today, SWANA Collective members Rana Sharif and David Lloyd talk to Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who has been a regular guest on SWANA Region Radio, about the unfolding events in her home city of colonized Jerusalem and across Palestine. Professor Kevorkian is Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law in the Institute of Criminology of the Faculty of Law and a professor in the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of many important articles and books, including most recently Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding and Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, both from Cambridge University Press.
Given the importance of these events and Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s analyses, we have created an extended podcast of this interview that will be posted on our usual platforms. This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members David Lloyd and Rana Sharif.
The conclusion of the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan this week, which coincides with the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, has seen not the customary celebration of Eid al-Fitr, but a vicious upsurge of Israeli violence against Palestinians across historic Palestine. For some time, Israeli police have been suppressing demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrar in occupied East Jerusalem against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes by a right-wing settler organization as part of Israel’s continuing effort to dispossess and displace Palestinians all over ‘48 and the West Bank. Israeli police also barred Muslims from celebrating Ramadan at the Damascus Gate and from reaching the venerated Al-Aqsa Compound in the Old City and violated its sanctity with tear gas, noise bombs, and military incursions into the holy site. Across Israel and the West Bank, violent settler mobs have reacted with fury against growing Palestinian protest and engaged in ugly attacks on the persons and property of Palestinians who are supposed to be their fellow citizens.
In response to these violations, Hamas and other militant organizations in Gaza have fired barrages of rockets that for the first time have succeeded in penetrating Israeli defenses and striking far from the Gaza border. These responses to Israeli violence were met with a full-out assault by Israel’s armed forces in which they have already massacred at least 139 Palestinians, most of them women and children, in Gaza’s open-air prison. As always homes, schools, and other civilian infrastructure have been pounded in accord with Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine which advocates for the destruction of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.
Nonetheless, we have been treated to the customary spectacle this week of a mealy-mouthed US President and his appointees pronouncing on Israel’s right to self-defense while ignoring their closest ally’s endless violations of international and humanitarian law and the Palestinians’ own legal right, as an occupied people, to defend themselves and oppose the occupier. But as Palestinian protest spreads across all of Historic Palestine, including in the cities of Haifa, Acra, Lyd and Tel Aviv, and throughout the diaspora, it is clear that they are not waiting for a US president’s permission to exercise that right once again.
The events of the last weeks may have provided the sparks for open conflict, but must be seen in their wider context. In a month when the respected international human rights organization Human Rights Watch issued a report that showed that Israel is conducting an apartheid regime across the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea”, Israel’s violence must be seen in the context of its ongoing practices as a settler-colonial state committed to the expansion of its territory and the displacement of Palestinians by every possible means: killings, dispossession, terrorization. Human Rights Watch’s detailed report confirms what Palestinians themselves and their global solidarity networks have been saying for years. It is based not on the Israeli myths about democracy or “disputed territory” parrotted by our mainstream press, but on the facts on the ground that constitute what the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court describes as “inhumane acts … committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Israel’s daily practices, to which it gives the name of hafrada, separation or segregation in Hebrew, give ample evidence of its conformity with that definition, whether we consider the siege and assault on Gaza, the separate and unequal infrastructure of the West Bank, or the ongoing evictions of Palestinian families in Occupied East Jerusalem. This is the daily experience of Palestinians wherever they live, from the refugees denied the right to return or even to visit their homelands to the Palestinian “citizens” of Israel who live under more than 60 discriminatory laws. However much Israeli politicians and their staunch Zionist defenders, including the Biden administration, bluster about the definition, the steady examination of the facts confirms that Israel is an apartheid state. In the end, their only response can be the censorship and defamation of the messengers and violence against Palestinian protest and self-defense.
If you miss our live broadcast on kpfk.org, you can listen to this show and our previous shows as a podcast: https://anchor.fm/swana. You can also follow our updates on Facebook and Instagram. We thank you in advance for sharing!