Lessons of the alQuds Clashes

 

By: Yossi Schwartz & Boris Hammerschlag

The Internationalist Socialist League (Israel/Occupied Palestine)

26.07.2017

In the last two weeks the Zionist state has proven in action, that the widespread Palestinian belief that Israel is acting to take over the alAqsa compound has substantial merit to it. This battle for sovereignty over the holy places between the Zionist colonialist society and the native Palestinian population proves right before our eyes what we have been claiming for the past decade. The idea that a colonialist society, as a whole, is in any way shape or form capable of self-containment, is ludicrous at best.

It was also proven that the native Palestinian nation cannot afford to let its guard down for even a split second. Furthermore, should it collectively take a decisive position of struggle, it could put enough pressure to send the Zionist apartheid regime on a humiliating retreat.

Retreat we say and stand by it, but unfortunately, not defeat. In order to defeat Zionism, i.e. establish a Palestinian democratic republic, a genuinely free society for all native religious groups and ethnicities from the river to the sea, Israel must lose its protective vest in the form of the corrupt, despotic and oppressive regimes throughout the region, via a renewed revolutionary Arab Spring.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who is internationally known as a person who cannot distinguish fact from fiction, has declared that Israel does not wish to change the status quo over the “Temple Mount”. However,  by installing  metal detectors, it had placed at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound and by using Israeli police to decide who will enter the mosques, Israel has shown that it considers itself as the sole sovereign.

If anyone still had any illusions, a day before yesterday (Monday) Tzipi Hotovely, a member of the Knesset for the Likud, and the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs since 2015, conveyed a few times on the Israeli TV that Israel is the sole sovereign over the compound she calls Har Habayit (Temple Mount). In an infamous interview she also shared her dream with the viewers to see the Israeli flag fly over the Temple Mount.^[1] 

Murder Fiasco in Jordan

Yesterday, the issue has surfaced in Jordan when an Israeli security guard murdered in cold blood two Arabs, one of them a 17 year old Palestinian. According to Jordanian news service two Jordanians have been killed and an Israeli wounded by gunfire in a residential building in the heavily fortified Israeli embassy compound in Jordan’s capital of Amman. The kingdom’s Public Security Directorate said that the shooting took place on Sunday evening in a residential building used by embassy staff. Police said that the two Jordanians worked for a furniture company and entered the embassy compound to carry out repairs.

Thousands of Jordanians took to the streets of Amman after Friday prayers to denounce the Israeli measures at the al-Haram ash-Sharif compound. Jordan is the official custodian of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.^[2]

According to the Israeli media the 17 year old youth attacked the guard with a screwdriver and the guard used his pistol to kill him. Even if this was the case, it is clear that the trained guard could disarm the young man very easily. The boy was killed because the guard wanted to.

King Abdullah is a loyal servant of US imperialism and an ally of Israel. Thus, he allowed the killer to leave for Israel. However, Israel was forced to remove the metal detectors, but in another humiliating act for the Muslims expressed its plans to have them replaced by most-advanced surveillance cameras.

Whether the Zionist government is acting out of plain stupidity or sinister aims, we do not have sufficient evidence to be sure. But the colonialist struggle between a settler colonialist society and the native population is gradually being nudged by the Zionist movement’s right wing towards a global religious holy war between the Jews and nearly 2 billion Muslims. The Zionist right also tries very hard to drag the Christian world along with it to participate in this bloody adventure.

This time, it retreated because it failed to provoke enough desperate and misguided individuals to retaliate in a sufficiently horrifying manner. It failed to rally enough public support outside Israel, but mostly it received enough phone calls from its neighboring ally dictators demanding that it stops contributing to the destabilization of their regimes.

Israel is not only an oppressive place for the Palestinians and the Arabs in general, but a death trap for the Jews. The only way for the Jews to survive is to break from Zionism and join the Palestinian struggle against their national oppression. To such Jews who see themselves as supporters of democracy and social justice we suggest, as a first step, joining forces with Balad, which recently officially opened its gate to social justice oriented Israelis.

The only way forward is to organize the mass-struggle around the idea of a single decolonized democratic state formed by the Palestinian workers, urban and rural poor, and those Jews willing to break with Zionism. 

 

---