[News] 'Operation Guardian of the Walls' Will Not Fix Israel’s Apartheid Walls

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/operation-guardian-of-the-walls-will-not-fix-israels-apartheid-walls/
'Operation
Guardian of the Walls' Will Not Fix Israel’s Apartheid Walls
May 13, 2021
------------------------------
An Israeli airstrike on Gaza. (Photo: Fawzi Mahmoud, The Palestine
Chronicle)

*By Jamal Juma <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jamal-juma>*

Israel has once again gone on a killing spree. Over 83 Palestinians,
including 17 children, have already been killed in Israel’s bombings of
Gaza as of today, 13 May 2021. Israeli forces have escalated their
repression and attacked the Al Aqsa Mosque four times this week. Over one
thousand Palestinians are wounded.

The numbers are rising as you read. In an unprecedented act, Israel has
redeployed their military troops normally stationed in the occupied West
Bank, called ‘Border Police,’ inside the Green Line.

We are in pain for the losses of lives, our wounded, our prisoners, the
destruction of our homes and our holy sites.

We are in urgent need of maximum global mobilization to pressure Israel to
stop this onslaught now. More importantly, we need for the international
community to recognize Israel’s regime as the system of apartheid,
settler-colonialism and occupation that it is. Israel must be held
accountable for its crimes for the crimes to end.

*We Just Will Not Accept Apartheid*

As Palestinians, we call for support but we are not passive victims. We
would not have withstood 73 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and
Israeli attempts to destroy our presence at all levels, including the
systematic suppression of our national identity, our social relations and
cultural expressions.

What we are witnessing today follows a month of relentless attempts by
Israel to stop Palestinians from doing what they have always done: to
celebrate Ramadan in Jerusalem, filling the al Aqsa Mosque and the streets
of Jerusalem at night.

Palestinians haven’t budged. They won a number of small victories against
Israel’s attempts to exclude them from their city of Jerusalem. They have
achieved the removal of ‘security’ barriers at Damascus Gate, which blocked
access to the Old City. The displacement of the Palestinian families in the
Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has been postponed up to this
point. When Israel tried to stop Palestinian citizens of Israel from coming
to Jerusalem for the end of Ramadan, Palestinians from Jerusalem came out
in mass, simultaneously bringing to a complete standstill Israel’s main
highway leading to Tel Aviv as they welcomed and accompanied Palestinians
on their way to the holy city. In the end, the annual march of Israeli
settlers to the al Aqsa Mosque had to be canceled.

The reaction from Gaza to the ongoing Israeli aggression on the al Aqsa
Mosque and Jerusalem may have been predictable. What caught the Israeli
establishment by surprise was the explosion of protests in Israel’s
so-called ‘mixed’ cities. The real meaning of what Israel calls
‘coexistence’ has been laid bare. These cities are – Israeli society is – a
system of apartheid. There is Sun City and there is Sharpeville and
Palestinians just won’t have it.

Today Palestinians are demanding their rights on the streets everywhere.

The walls of Israeli apartheid are crumbling.

*Guarding the Cracks in Their Apartheid Walls *

Israel has called its current military onslaught “Operation Guardian of the
Walls”. It is a name of chilling honesty. Israel will do everything it can
to subdue Palestinians, to at least momentarily close the cracks in their
walls of oppression.

Israel thought it had Gazans besieged behind walls, confined in an
unlivable environment and crushed under the trauma of repeated massacres in
2006, 2009 and 2014 to keep them suffering in silence. They believed
Palestinians in the West Bank were trapped within the confines of its
apartheid Wall that encircles their villages and towns.

Maybe even worse, Israel imagined the West Bank compliant with a
Palestinian Authority that currently uses its security forces as
substitutes for the Israeli Border Police, which have been deployed beyond
in the Green Line, in order to protect illegal Israeli military
checkpoints, its equally illegal Wall and other places of protest.
Palestinians in Jerusalem were supposedly leaderless and busy with their
basic survival.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, so they thought, had grown used to living
as third-class citizens under apartheid and happy just to cast a vote once
in a while for a political system in which they will never actually have a
say.

Palestinian refugees should have simply stayed forgotten amidst the flurry
of normalization deals with Arab dictatorships.

Israel developed an elaborate system to fragment the Palestinian people in
differentiated, oppressive regimes.

A perfect fortress to defend Israeli apartheid.

All of a sudden, the walls of this fortress are showing cracks. Some walls
have simply crumbled as protests have rocked cities from Nazareth in the
north to Rahat in the Naqab.

Today we are all united once again. Today we reaffirm together that we
won’t leave and that we will struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

No one knows what will happen next. Yet one thing is sure: No Operation,
however brutal, will fix these cracks in the Wall.

*– Jamal Juma is the general coordinator of the Stop the Wall Campaign. He
contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.*
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