Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 17.04.2022
According to the Palestinian presidency on Friday very early in the morning a large force of the heavily-armed Zionist police entered Al-Aqua Mosque compound and broke into the Al-Qibli prayer hall, a 1,000-year-old domed building, beating Palestinian worshippers in the main prayer hall inside the mosque, forcing them to lie face down. Images of worshippers tied up and lying on al-Aqsa’s carpeted prayer hall during the second Friday of Ramadan quickly went viral. Some footage circulated online showed Israeli forces beating the detainees. The Police fired tear gas into the hall, smashed some of its windows and detained 400 people.
They used batons and tear gas to violently disperse hundreds of worshipers who gathered at the holy site before dawn for prayers and cleared the mosque’s courtyards. Police were seen beating journalists, women and elderly people. [i]
The Palestinian Red Crescent said that its medics provided treatment to over 153 people, including journalists and medics, mostly with upper-body injuries, and transferred some 30 others to nearby hospitals. [ii]
This event brings to mind 2021 Ramadan clashes when Israeli settlers took over Palestinian property in Sheikh Jarrah and the police encroached upon the mosque compound, culminating in I led to rocket attacks on Israel from the besieged Gaza Strip, and an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza itself. The conflict led to the deaths of at least 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, and 12 Israelis, including two children.
During the 2021 Ramadan month, Jerusalem saw protests and night-time confrontations between Israeli police and Palestinian worshipers, with tensions mounting over the police decision to ban people from sitting on the stairs outside Bab al-Amoud under the guise of implementing the coronavirus restrictions, and its decision to disconnect the power supply to the call to prayer at the mosque. [iii]
According to WAFA news on the same Friday April 15, 2022 Dozens of Palestinians were injured as the Zionist armed forces attacked and dispersed several Palestinian protests across the 1967 occupied West Bank. In Qalqilia province, north of the West Bank, at least three Palestinians were injured by Zionist army during the weekly protest against Israeli settlement construction in the village of Kafr Qaddum. [iv]
PA Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of the Palestinian Authority (PA)Riyad al-Maliki said that the brutal storming by the Israeli occupation forces and police into Al-Aqsa Mosque on the second Friday of the holy month of Ramadan was the latest in Israel’s attempts “to Israelize and Judaize Jerusalem and abuse its Christian and Islamic sanctities, especially the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
“The Israeli occupation authorities are exploiting the double international standards to perpetuate their occupation of Jerusalem to completely separate it from its Palestinian sphere,” said the Foreign Minister. “The Israeli government is exporting its crises to the Palestinian arena at the expense of the rights of our people.” [v]
While the Palestinian Authority PA denounces the Zionist assault the Palestinian people demand that the PA end the collaboration with the Zionist security forces against the Palestinians. The illusion of a two state solution is dissipating and the number of Palestinians who demand a free democratic state from the river to the sea is growing.
On Sunday morning protesting Palestinians threw stones at three buses that were on route to the Western Wall. Clashes broke out between Palestinians and Zionist security forces in front of the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court (East Jerusalem) on Saturday night, after the Zionist Police had decided not to release those detained at al-Aqsa on Friday.
In Nazareth within pre 1967 occupation, Palestinian citizens of Israel clashed with police during a demonstration about Friday’s clashes at al-Aqsa. At least 20 arrests were reported by Palestinian media. Video from the scene showed rioters burning large fires in the middle of a street in the city. [vi]
The assault on Al-Aqsa Mosque creates tension within the Bennett-Meretz government.
“The leader of the Islamist Ra’am party said Friday that he had informed his coalition partners that violent clashes on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem were a “red line” that could further harm Israel’s unstable government.“The continued harm to Al-Aqsa is a red line for us, including in the context of coalition stability,” Mansour Abbas said in an interview on Radio Al-Shams.“In the case of Al-Aqsa, there are no political considerations,” he added, referring to the holy site by the name of the mosque Ra’am MK Mazen Ghnaim later threatened to quit the coalition “if the actions of the security forces at the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque aren’t halted immediately.”“A government that acts this way… has no right to exist,” he said in a statement addressed to Bennett.” [vii]
But these are no more than empty words. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas reassured the Zionists that his party has no interest in bringing down the government. “Asked what would happen between the Ra’am Party and the rest of the governing coalition should the clashes continue, Abbas reassured the public that Ra’am has no interest in bringing down the government, despite MK Mazen Ghanaim’s warning to Bennett in a letter on Friday that he would pull out of the coalition if police activity on the Temple Mount does not cease.“We have a historic opportunity [as part of the coalition] and we want to use it for good, of course for the Arab sector, but also for the good of Israel’s population in general, and we are doing that,… I think Odeh made a mistake with his words,” Abbas said. “They didn’t do any good for anyone. Arab police officers aren’t about to sit at home and throw away their guns. Let’s be careful, let’s choose our words carefully. We need to get through this tense period of time.”
We choose our words very carefully and tell Mansour Abbas that you are a traitor to the oppressed Palestinians. You are not the first Palestinian traitor, during the Arab revolt 1936-9 against British colonial rule and Jewish settlement, there were the pro-British, anti-rebel Palestinian militia “peace bands,” associated with the Palestinian Nashashibi family and raised with British and Jewish military and financial assistance, and with support from the British Consul in Damascus, Gilbert MacKereth. They were part of the British methods of imperial pacification using “loyalist” force against the anti-imperialist rebels.
Clearly this reactionary Zionist government has declared a war against the Palestinians People.
Would the Zionist state terror lead to the same clashes like last year or even to a popular Intifada? It is too early to know but if they will take place let us hope they will be a boost to a new Arab revolution against the reactionary Arab rulers that collaborate with US and Israel, the Arab masses are very aware of the hypocrisy of Western imperialism and their support to the Ukraine fighting Russian imperialism invasion of Ukraine while the struggle for national liberation of the Palestinians is called terrorism. In any case in a new war of Israel against the Palestinians the interest of the international working class is to stand with the Palestinians against the Zionist imperialist settler colonialist state.
In the revolutionary process the first phase will be the struggle for a secular democratic state that we fully support. However, to win against the Zionist apartheid imperialist state this struggle within the same historical process must lead to a socialist revolution as part of the Arab revolution that will form the socialist federation of the Middle East. This is the strategy of the permanent revolution in Palestine. The failure of the previous Arab revolution, or as it is sometimes called the Arab spring, proves this theory and strategy in the negative. Lacking a revolutionary socialist leadership, the democratic revolution failed.
Down with the Zionist state terror!
For a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/128817
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Ibid
[iv] https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/128820
[v] https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/128818
[vi] https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-704366
[vii] https://www.timesofisrael.com/raam-warns-temple-mount-violence-threatens-teetering-coalition-pm-holds-assessment/