For those who have been paying attention, things in Israel and Gaza have begun to spiral out of control. I expect that sooner rather than later the Palestinians in the West Bank will also be drawn in. While we could, and I suppose someone somewhere will, recount all of the misdeeds on both sides going back decades that has led us to this moment, the real proximate cause of the current conflict occurred several weeks ago:
⬇️ This is what started it all https://t.co/ezNyy88X9O
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) May 11, 2021
I wrote about the events that took place up to and around that enclosure on 22 April. The Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) is that for several weeks, the newly empowered Israeli Jewish neo-fascist Kahanists of LeHava, now represented in Knesset by the Jewish Power Party, began a series of violent attacks in Jerusalem against anyone they think is Arab or Palestinian or is Israeli or Jewish, but not right wing. You can thank Bibi for this. He normalized them in his quest to remain prime minister, in power, and out of prison.
All of this is wrapped around an attempt by Israel to evict Israeli Arab/Palestinian residents from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Hayes Brown, in an excellent column for MSNBC laid out the basic asymmetry of the problem (emphasis mine):
As we’re watching what might well turn into a third intifada play out in Jerusalem, images of fires burning among the trees outside the Al-Aqsa mosque and reports of children being injured in a new volley of airstrikes in Gaza, I can’t get a line from the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry out of my head.
“Regrettably, the PA” — the Palestinian Authority — “and Palestinian terror groups are presenting a real-estate dispute between private parties, as a nationalistic cause, in order to incite violence in Jerusalem,” the ministry said in a statement Saturday, two days after anger in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem began to boil over.
Calling the catalyst of all this a “real estate dispute” is a particularly noxious way to diminish what’s actually occurring: Nahalat Shimon, a U.S.-based settler organization, is trying to have Palestinians who have lived in the neighborhood since 1956 evicted. Once they are evicted, the property — occupied by Israel along with the rest of east Jerusalem since 1967 — would then be turned over to Jewish settlers under Israeli law. The six families who have been fighting to keep their homes since 1982 would get nothing to ease their displacement.
Because this is about more than just six families. It’s about whether Palestinians will be allowed to live in east Jerusalem at all. The New York Times laid out the imbalance clearly: “In East Jerusalem, Jews are allowed to reclaim property that was under Jewish ownership before 1948. But Palestinian families have no legal mechanism to reclaim land they owned in West Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel.“
I want to take a moment and reinforce something that Brown wrote, specifically that the organization trying to force the evictions in court is a US based organization that promotes Jewish settlement of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The US is definitely part of the problem here and Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute wrote an excellent column for Foreign Policy on the US’s complicity in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Washington’s response to the violence was notably muted. As Jewish Israeli extremists attacked Palestinians in Jerusalem, the U.S. State Department issued a generic statement that smacked of both sides-ism, rejecting the “rhetoric of extremist protestors chanting hateful and violent slogans” and calling for calm—but failing to identify the extremists or their targets. It was equally striking that hardly a single member of Congress could muster even a generic condemnation of violence perpetrated by Jewish Israeli extremists, particularly given how traditionally vocal they are whenever violence emanates from Palestinians. But none of it was surprising. Indeed, Washington remains firmly in denial about the growing trend of extremism in Israeli politics and society—a reality that has both enabled and fueled it.
Such actions might have triggered at least a mild rebuke by U.S. officials in the pre-Trump past, but the White House is effectively giving the evictions a green light by staying on the sidelines. Indeed, the United States has long been central to the growth of Israel’s pro-settlement and anti-Palestinian right.