Israel: Is this the beginning of the end of apartheid?
Richard Falk
18 May 2021 15:35 UTC | Middle East Eye
▻https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-apartheid-beginning-end
The current crisis of Palestine-Israel deepens and widens: casualties mount, smoke from destroyed buildings blacken the sky over Gaza, there’s rioting on the streets of many Israeli and West Bank towns; Israeli police disrupt worshippers in Al-Aqsa mosque while protecting extremist Jewish settlers shouting genocidal slogans - “death to the Arabs” - in inflammatory marches through Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Western leaders pathetically call for calm on both sides as if both sides shared equal blame, while perversely affirming the one-sidedness of ’Israel’s right to defend itself’
Underlying this entire eruption of tensions between the oppressor and the oppressed were the flimsy legalised evictions of six Palestinian families long resident in Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem. These evictions epitomised the long Palestinian ordeal of persecution and banishment in what remains their homeland.
While this mayhem continues, the lights have remained scandalously dim at the UN. Western leaders pathetically call for calm on both sides as if both sides shared equal blame, while perversely affirming the one-sidedness of “Israel’s right to defend itself”, which supposes that Israel had been attacked out of the blue.
Is this but one more cycle of violence exhibiting the unresolvable clash between a native people overwhelmed by a colonial intruder emboldened by a unique religiously grounded settler sense of entitlement?
Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the century-long struggle by the Palestinian people to defend their homeland against the unfolding Zionist project that stole their land, trampled on their dignity, and made Palestinians victimised strangers in what had been their national home for centuries?
Only the future can fully unravel this haunting uncertainty. In the meantime, we can expect more bloodshed, death, outrage, grief, injustice, and continuing geopolitical interference. (...)