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<font size="1"><a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210423-israels-pogroms-in-jerusalem/">https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210423-israels-pogroms-in-jerusalem/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel's pogroms in Jerusalem</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Asa Winstanley - April 23, 2021<br></div></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-post-content"><p>The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/pogrom" target="_blank">Encyclopaedia Britannica defines</a>
a pogrom as "a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities,
against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national
minority".</p><p>That is exactly what is happening today against the Palestinian people in Jerusalem.</p><p>Palestinians
are not a minority in Palestine – the country that lies between the
Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. But due to <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/downloads/201703_UN_ESCWA-israeli-practices-palestinian-people-apartheid-occupation-english.pdf">Israel's apartheid regime</a> that has ruled the country since <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170515-remembering-the-nakba/">1948</a>,
the majority of Palestinians were expelled from the areas that today
form so-called "Israel proper", and which many Palestinians term "1948
Palestine".</p><p>Due to a slow process of Israeli ethnic cleansing
since then, Palestinians are no longer the majority in Jerusalem. But in
recent weeks that process has sped up in that city, the historic
capital of Palestine.</p><p>Some truly terrifying clips have been
circulated online – including by credible journalists – showing
rampaging mobs of mostly young Israeli men attacking Palestinians in
Jerusalem and <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210423-100s-jerusalemites-injured-as-ultra-right-wing-israelis-march-chant-death-to-arabs/">chanting</a> "Death to the Arabs" (while being incited and led by <a href="https://twitter.com/davidsheen/status/1385337007459741700" target="_blank">mainstream Israeli political</a> and religious leaders).</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Hundreds of Jewish supremacists descend upon Palestinian East Jerusalem, chanting "Death to the Arabs!" <a href="https://t.co/zQvQttn2Rv" target="_blank">https://t.co/zQvQttn2Rv</a></p><p>— David Sheen (@davidsheen) <a href="https://twitter.com/davidsheen/status/1385319944762675206?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 22, 2021</a></p></blockquote><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">HAPPENING NOW: Armed far-right Israeli civilians attack a Palestinian home while children cry.</p><p>These are the kinds of acts of blood-curdling violence that Israelis are committing en masse in Jerusalem tonight.</p><p>Keep your eyes on and your hearts with the Palestinians there. <a href="https://t.co/1GKBXeoOcx" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/1GKBXeoOcx</a></p><p>— JVP #SaveSheikhJarrah (@jvplive) <a href="https://twitter.com/jvplive/status/1385365600885559297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 22, 2021</a></p></blockquote><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Raw footage from last night <a href="https://t.co/8jvD4KYxfI" target="_blank">https://t.co/8jvD4KYxfI</a></p><p>— David Sheen (@davidsheen) <a href="https://twitter.com/davidsheen/status/1385522106889297922?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 23, 2021</a></p></blockquote><p>This is not a new phenomenon, but it has increased in recent weeks, partly due to a <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-save-sheikh-jarrah-campaign" target="_blank">ruling by an Israeli court demanding</a> new expulsions of Palestinian families from the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.</p><p><strong>READ: <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210417-the-real-apartheid/">The 'real' apartheid</a></strong></p><p>The families have been until the start of May to leave their homes and hand them over to Israeli settlers.</p><p>These
actions by the apartheid state of Israel have only encouraged the
"Death to the Arabs" hate mobs. And therein lies the key to understating
the essence of a pogrom.</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Israeli
settlers rampage through occupied Jerusalem chanting "Death to the
Arabs." What you see here is not a fringe minority of extremists, but
the mainstream racism of a state built on ethnic cleansing and
apartheid. <a href="https://t.co/vCjsTZMJer" target="_blank">https://t.co/vCjsTZMJer</a></p><p>— Tamara Nassar (@TamaraINassar) <a href="https://twitter.com/TamaraINassar/status/1385321445006397446?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 22, 2021</a></p></blockquote><p>A
pogrom is carried out by violent mobs, who are deemed in the discourse
of the government and of the corporate media to be "extremists". There
is no doubt that these mobs are far-right Jewish-supremacist extremists
by any objective definition.</p><p>But they are not extremists in terms
of the mainstream of Israeli political discourse and – crucially – of
the actions of the racist state itself.</p><p>You can see this very
clearly in a viral video clip that was circulated by the American
anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace.</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">These clips of the settler are from the 2009 film "My Neighborhood."</p><p>But they could've been filmed yesterday.</p><p>This May, settlers will once again forcibly remove Palestinian families in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/SheikhJarrah?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">#SheikhJarrah</a>. Their efforts to do so have been sustained, unrelenting, over decades now. <a href="https://t.co/f0FAM6wbH8" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/f0FAM6wbH8</a></p><p>— JVP #SaveSheikhJarrah (@jvplive) <a href="https://twitter.com/jvplive/status/1384898285777952769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 21, 2021</a></p></blockquote><p>The
clip was from a 2009 film about Sheikh Jarrah. But as JVP notes, it
could easily have been filmed today. Expulsions of Palestinians by mobs
of highly ideological religious Zionist fanatics are still frequently
carried out, in the same way seen in the clip.</p><p>But the most
telling part of the video is perhaps not so much the actions of the mob
itself, but how they are endorsed and backed by the racist state.</p><p>You
see the thugs of Israel's highly-armed military "Border Police" force
standing by and watching the takeover, making sure that the Palestinians
are not able to defend themselves or their homes.</p><p>This is the very definition of a pogrom.</p><p>In
the clip posted by JVP, Israeli settler leader Jonathan Yosef is
shamelessly explicit about all this, saying: "We take house after house.
All this area will be a Jewish neighbourhood … We are going to the next
neighbourhood and after that we'll go [to] more. Our dream [is] that
all East Jerusalem will be like West Jerusalem. [A] Jewish capital of
Israel."</p><p>He then gives a far clearer, far more honest – and
frankly more accurate – definition of Zionism than the lying
dissimulators of liberal and "left-wing" Zionism ever could (with their
nonsense about "Jewish self-determination" in a country which has never
been exclusively Jewish).</p><blockquote><p>I see this as a continuation
of the Zionist project. The return to Zion. Is it at the Arabs'
expense? Yes. But our government institutions were also built at the
expense of Arabs who lived here. And so was the state itself</p></blockquote><p><strong></strong>he says.</p><p>Everything
Yosef said in this definition of Zionism is objectively true. The
difference though, is that he thinks that such violent, racist extremism
is good and praiseworthy, while I (and the vast majority of people
around the world) reject it as a horrifying injustice.</p><p>Yosef is no marginal figure or merely some obscure wild-eyed extremist. As my <a href="https://merip.org/2021/02/three-decades-after-his-death-kahanes-message-of-hate-is-more-popular-than-ever/" target="_blank">colleague David Sheen reports</a>,
he sits on Jerusalem's city council for Shas – a religious extremist
party which also happens to have won the third highest number of seats
in Israel's parliament in the election last month.</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">"we will stay here…"<a href="https://t.co/v0YCBLSRyw" target="_blank">https://t.co/v0YCBLSRyw</a></p><p>— Ben White (@benabyad) <a href="https://twitter.com/benabyad/status/1385514939004096515?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 23, 2021</a></p></blockquote><blockquote><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Despite the ongoing Israeli crackdown, thousands of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Palestinian?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">#Palestinian</a> worshipers performed the weekly Friday prayer today at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem. <a href="https://t.co/S4e24X4t25" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/S4e24X4t25</a></p><p>— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) <a href="https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1385545241680351234?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">April 23, 2021</a></p></blockquote><p>But the Palestinians show no sign of backing down, lying down, giving up, or, – in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/03/israel1" target="_blank">the words of Zionism's racist founder</a> Theodor Herzl – allowing Israel to "spirit the penniless population across the border" of Palestine.</p><p>The
views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.</p>
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