Peaceful protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city Auckland held an Easter prayer vigil honouring Palestinian political prisoners and the sacrifice of thousands of innocent lives as relentless Israeli bombing of displaced Gazans in tents killed at least 92 people in two days.

Organisers of the rally for the 80th week since the war began in October 2023 said they aimed for a shift in emphasis for quietness and meditation this spiritual weekend.

“This is dedicated to the Palestine Prisoners’ Day and those who have died, innocent of any crime — women, children, journalists, patients, friends, healthcare workers, those buried under rubble, non-military civilians,” said Kathy Ross of Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

“All those starving and needing our help,” she added.

The organisers created a flowers and candles circle of peace with hibiscus blossoms in an area of Britomart that has become dubbed “Palestinian Corner”.

Placards declared “Free all Palestinian prisoners — all 10,000 people” and “Release the Palestinian prisoners.”

Palestinian fusion dancer and singer Rana Hamida, who last year sailed on the Freedom Flotilla boat Handala in an attempt to break the Israel siege of Gaza, spoke about how people could keep their spirits up in the face of such terrible atrocities, and sang a haunting hymn.

Calmness and strength
She also described how the air and wind could help protesters seek calmness and strength in spite of storms like Cyclone Tam that gusted across much of New Zealand yesterday on Good Friday causing havoc.

She spread her arms like wings as Palestinian flags fluttered strongly, saying: “The wind is now blowing in exactly the right direction.”

Another PSNA organiser, Del Abcede, spoke about the incarceration of Palestinian paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who was kidnapped by the Israeli military last December 27 — two days after Christmas – and has been held in detention without charge and under torture ever since.

“The reason why he was arrested is because he would not leave his hospital or his patients,” she said, adding that he had been held incommunicado for a long time.

“I want to dedicate a special honour and prayer for him and I hope that he will be released soon.”

Beaten in prison
Dr Safiya is suffering from a serious eye injury as a result of being beaten in Israeli prison, his lawyer has revealed to media.

According to lawyer Ghaid Qassem, Dr Abu Safiya has been classified by Israeli authorities as an “unlawful combatant” but has not yet been charged or received any court trials.

Despite a global campaign calling for him to be released from prison, Israeli authorities have continued to interrogate and torture Dr Abu Safiya.

Another speaker at the vigil, Dr David Robie, said he had been a journalist for 50 years and he found it “shameful” that the Western media — including Aotearoa New Zealand — failed to report the genocide and ethnic cleansing truthfully, and in fact was normalising the “horrendous crimes”.

He called for silent prayer for the at least 232 Gazan journalists killed — many along with their entire families — who had been courageously reporting the truth to the rest of the world.

Banners at the vigil referred to “Jesus [was] Palestinian – born in Bethlehem” and “Let Gaza live”. One placard declared “Jesus was an anti-imperialist Palestinian Jew who preached (and practised) radical love for all – not a violent bully bigot”.

Other vigils and protests took place across New Zealand at Easter weekend, especially in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

‘Violating’ religious status quo
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem reports were emerging that Israelis were “taking pride in violating the status quo” with religious traditions at Easter.

Xavier Abu Eid, a political scientist and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from occupied East Jerusalem, explained on Al Jazeera that Jerusalem, “has a very central place” in the history of Palestinian Christians.

“We have to … understand what the Israeli occupation is doing to all Palestinians, because there is a concept. … It’s called the status quo. It’s understood and it’s under a very old agreement, centuries or older than the state of Israel,” he said.

Under the status quo, “the status of Christian and Muslim holy sites, including Al-Aqsa Mosque, for example, and the Holy Sepulchre, would be respected,” Dr Eid explained.

Despite this, he said, “Israeli government officials are taking pride in violating the status quo of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by allowing Israeli settlers to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque”.

He said the Israeli authorities are also trying to “turn the Mount of Olives, a very important place for this [Easter] celebration, into an Israeli national park”.

“So you’re talking about a community that feels under threat, not just from a national point of view with the Israeli government, pushing for ethnic cleansing and annexation, but also from the traditions that religiously we have kept here for generations,” he noted.

The UN Palestine relief agency UNRWA reports that after 1.5 years of war in Gaza, at least 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, 1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced multiple times, and the Israel military has blocked humanitarian aid from entering the besieged enclave for seven weeks.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The last fortnight has seen a series of brutal, deliberately provocative Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshippers at Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Needless to say, Israel had no business interfering in Muslim worship at Al Aqsa, the third holiest shrine for Muslims after Mecca and Medina, and an area which is not under their authority or control.

Despite this, Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa have intensified in recent years as the apartheid state strives to undermine all aspects of Palestinian life in Jerusalem. It is applying ethnic cleansing in slow motion.

Inevitably missile attacks on Israel from Gaza and Southern Lebanon followed and Israel has reveled in once again trying to portray itself to the world as the victim.

There is an excellent 10-minute video in which former Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi more than held her own against a hostile BBC interviewer here.

📽️ WATCH | A masterclass by @DrHananAshrawi illuminating the everyday violence & aggression Palestinians endure at the hands of Israel’s occupation, the inevitable local resistance to it & Israel’s ongoing impunity while also fending off @BBCWorld‘s spurious line of questioning. pic.twitter.com/eTpvXV7QbI

— Palestine Deep Dive (@PDeepdive) April 6, 2023

There is also an excellent podcast produced by Al Jazeera which backgrounds the increase in violence in the Middle East.

Inside Story: What triggered the spike in violence?   Video: Al Jazeera

Nour Odeh – Political analyst and former spokeswoman for the Palestinian National Authority.

Uri Dromi – Founder and president of the Jerusalem Press Club and a former spokesman for the Israel government.

Francesca Albanese – United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Further background on the politics around Al Aqsa is covered in this Al Jazeera podcast.

I strongly condemn Israel’s excessive use of force against Palestinian Muslims praying at #AlAqsaMosque during Ramadan, & its breaches of the #StatusQuo. This recklessness risks bringing further devastation to both sides of the Green Line.
Full statement: https://t.co/ys58j0bIzt https://t.co/mWfJiHSVaT

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) April 6, 2023

Initially reporting here in New Zealand was reasonable and clearly identified Israel as the brutal racist aggressors attacking Palestinian civilians at worship. However, within a couple of days media reporting deteriorated dramatically with the “normal” appalling reporting taking over — painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as simply enforcing “law and order”.

At the heart of appalling reporting for a long time has been the BBC which slavishly and consistently screws the scrum in Israel’s favour. The BBC does not report on the Middle East – it propagandises for Israel.

Journalist Jonathan Cook describes how the BBC coverage is enabling Israeli violence and UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, called out the BBC’s awful reporting in a tweet.

Renewed violence against Palestinian worshippers at #AlAqsaMosque on yet another Ramadan turned into suffering,must be condemned,investigated & accounted for.

Misleading media coverage 👇contributes to enabling Israel’s unchecked occupation & must also be condemned/accounted for https://t.co/JI6YzNgCju

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) April 5, 2023

It’s not just the BBC of course. For example The New York Times has been called out for deliberately distorting the news to blame Palestinians for Al Aqsa mosque crisis.

It’s not reporting — it’s propaganda!

Why is BBC important for Aotearoa New Zealand?
Unfortunately, here in Aotearoa New Zealand our media frequently and uncritically uses BBC reports to inform New Zealanders on the Middle East.

Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand, our state broadcasters, are the worst offenders.

For example here are two BBC stories carried by RNZ this past week here and here. They cover the deaths of three Jewish women in a terrorist attack in the occupied West Bank.

The media should report such killings but there is no context given for the illegal Jewish-only settlements at the heart in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s military occupation across all Palestine, the daily ritual humiliation and debasement of Palestinians or its racist apartheid policies towards Palestinians — or as Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem describes it “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”.

Neither are there Palestinian voices in the above reports — they are typically absent from most Middle East reporting, or at best muted, compared to extensive quoting from racist Israeli leaders.

The BBC is happy to report the “what?” but not the “why?”

Needless to say neither Radio New Zealand, nor TVNZ, has provided any such sympathetic coverage for the many dozens of Palestinians killed by Israel this year — including at least 16 Palestinian children. To the BBC, RNZ and TVNZ, murdered Palestinian children are simply statistics.

RNZ and TVNZ say they cannot ensure to cover all the complexities of the Middle East in every story and that people get a balanced view over time from their regular reporting.

This is not true. Their reliance on so much systematically-biased BBC reporting, and other sources which are often not much better, tells a different story.

For example, references to Israel as an apartheid state — something attested to by every credible human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — are always absent from any RNZ or TVNZ reporting and yet this is critical to help people understand what is going on in Palestine.

Neither are there significant references to international law or United Nations resolutions — the tools which provide for a Middle East peace based on justice — the only peace possible.

Unlike their reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RNZ and TVNZ reporting on the Middle East leaves people confused and ready to blame both sides equally for the murder and mayhem unleashed by Israel on Palestinians and Palestinian resistance to the Israeli military occupation and all that entails.

John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article is republished from the PSNA newsletter with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate and tireless campaigner against South African apartheid, once observed: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

For decades, the BBC’s editorial policy in reporting on Israel and Palestine has consistently chosen the side of the oppressor — and all too often, not even by adopting the impartiality the corporation claims as the bedrock of its journalism.

Instead, the British state broadcaster regularly chooses language and terminology whose effect is to deceive its audience. And it compounds such journalistic malpractice by omitting vital pieces of context when that extra information would present Israel in a bad light.

BBC bias — which entails knee-jerk echoing of the British establishment’s support for Israel as a highly militarised ally projecting Western interests into the oil-rich Middle East – was starkly on show once again this week as the broadcaster reported on the violence at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Social media was full of videos showing heavily armed Israeli police storming the mosque complex during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Police could be seen pushing peaceful Muslim worshippers, including elderly men, off their prayer mats and forcing them to leave the site. In other scenes, police were filmed beating worshippers inside a darkened Al-Aqsa, while women could be heard screaming in protest.

What is wrong with the British state broadcaster’s approach — and much of the rest of the Western media’s — is distilled in one short BBC headline: “Clashes erupt at contested holy site.”

Into a sentence of just six words, the BBC manages to cram three bogusly “neutral” words, whose function is not to illuminate or even to report, but to trick the audience, as Tutu warned, into siding with the oppressor.

Furious backlash
Though video of the beatings was later included on the BBC’s website and the headline changed after a furious online backlash, none of the sense of unprovoked, brutal Israeli state violence, or its malevolent rationale, was captured by the BBC’s reporting.

To call al-Aqsa a ‘contested holy site’, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting

The “clashes” at al-Aqsa, in the BBC’s telling, presume a violent encounter between two groups: Palestinians, described by Israel and echoed by the BBC as “agitators”, on one side; and Israeli forces of law and order on the other.

That is the context, according to the BBC, for why unarmed Palestinians at worship need to be beaten. And that message is reinforced by the broadcaster’s description of the seizure of hundreds of Palestinians at worship as “arrests” — as though an unwelcome, occupying, belligerent security force present on another people’s land is neutrally and equitably upholding the law.

“Erupt” continues the theme. It suggests the “clashes” are a natural force, like an earthquake or volcano, over which Israeli police presumably have little, if any, control. They must simply deal with the eruption to bring it to an end.

And the reference to the “contested” holy site of Al-Aqsa provides a spurious context legitimising Israeli state violence: police need to be at Al-Aqsa because their job is to restore calm by keeping the two sides “contesting” the site from harming each other or damaging the holy site itself.

The BBC buttresses this idea by uncritically citing an Israeli police statement accusing Palestinians of being at Al-Aqsa to “disrupt public order and desecrate the mosque”.

Palestinians are thus accused of desecrating their own holy site simply by worshipping there — rather than the desecration committed by Israeli police in storming al-Aqsa and violently disrupting worship.

The History of Al-Aqsa Mosque.  Video: Middle East Eye

Israeli provocateurs
The BBC’s framing should be obviously preposterous to any rookie journalist in Jerusalem. It assumes that Israeli police are arbiters or mediators at Al-Aqsa, dispassionately enforcing law and order at a Muslim place of worship, rather than the truth: that for decades, the job of Israeli police has been to act as provocateurs, dispatched by a self-declared Jewish state, to undermine the long-established status quo of Muslim control over Al-Aqsa.

Events were repeated for a second night this week when police again raided Al-Aqsa, firing rubber bullets and tear gas as thousands of Palestinians were at prayer. US statements calling for “calm” and “de-escalation” adopted the same bogus evenhandedness as the BBC.

The mosque site is not “contested”, except in the imagination of Jewish religious extremists, some of them in the Israeli government, and the most craven kind of journalists.

True, there are believed to be the remains of two long-destroyed Jewish temples somewhere underneath the raised mount where al-Aqsa is built. According to Jewish religious tradition, the Western Wall — credited with being a retaining wall for one of the disappeared temples – is a place of worship for Jews.

But under that same Jewish rabbinical tradition, the plaza where Al-Aqsa is sited is strictly off-limits to Jews. The idea of Al-Aqsa complex as being “contested” is purely an invention of the Israeli state — now backed by a few extremist settler rabbis — that exploits this supposed “dispute” as the pretext to assert Jewish sovereignty over a critically important piece of occupied Palestinian territory.

Israel’s goal — not Judaism’s — is to strip Palestinians of their most cherished national symbol, the foundation of their religious and emotional attachment to the land of their ancestors, and transfer that symbol to a state claiming to exclusively represent the Jewish people.

To call Al-Aqsa a “contested holy site”, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting.

‘Equal rights’ at Al-Aqsa
The reality is that there would have been no “clashes”, no “eruption” and no “contest” had Israeli police not chosen to storm Al-Aqsa while Palestinians were worshipping there during the holiest time of the year.

This is not a ‘clash’. It is not a ‘conflict’. Those supposedly ‘neutral’ terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing

There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not aggressively enforcing a permanent occupation of Palestinian land in Jerusalem, which has encroached ever more firmly on Muslim access to, and control over, the mosque complex.

There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not taking orders from the latest – and most extreme – of a series of police ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir, who does not even bother to hide his view that Al-Aqsa must be under absolute Jewish sovereignty.

There would have been no “clashes” had Israeli police not been actively assisting Jewish religious settlers and bigots to create facts on the ground over many years — facts to bolster an evolving Israeli political agenda that seeks “equal rights” at Al-Aqsa for Jewish extremists, modelled on a similar takeover by settlers of the historic Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

And there would have been no “clashes” if Palestinians were not fully aware that, over many years, a tiny, fringe Jewish settler movement plotting to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque to build a Third Temple in its place has steadily grown, flourishing under the sponsorship of Israeli politicians and ever more sympathetic Israeli media coverage.

Cover story for violence
Along with the Israeli army, the paramilitary Israeli police are the main vehicle for the violent subjugation of Palestinians, as the Israeli state and its settler emissaries dispossess Palestinians, driving them into ever smaller enclaves.

This is not a “clash”. It is not a “conflict”. Those supposedly “neutral” terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

Just as there is a consistent, discernible pattern to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, there is a parallel, discernible pattern in the Western media’s misleading reporting on Israel and Palestine.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being systematically dispossessed by Israel of their homes and farmlands so they can be herded into overcrowded, resource-starved cities.

Palestinians in Gaza have been dispossessed of their access to the outside world, and even to other Palestinians, by an Israeli siege that encages them in an overcrowded, resourced-starved coastal enclave.

And in the Old City of Jerusalem, Palestinians are being progressively dispossessed by Israel of access to, and control over, their central religious resource: Al-Aqsa Mosque. Their strongest source of religious and emotional attachment to Jerusalem is being actively stolen from them.

To describe as “clashes” any of these violent state processes — carefully calibrated by Israel so they can be rationalised to outsiders as a “security response” — is to commit the very journalistic sin Tutu warned of. In fact, it is not just to side with the oppressor, but to intensify the oppression; to help provide the cover story for it.

That point was made this week by Francesca Albanese, the UN expert on Israel’s occupation. She noted in a tweet about the BBC’s reporting of the Al-Aqsa violence: “Misleading media coverage contributes to enabling Israel’s unchecked occupation & must also be condemned/accounted for.”

Bad journalism
There can be reasons for bad journalism. Reporters are human and make mistakes, and they can use language unthinkingly, especially when they are under pressure or events are unexpected.

It is an editorial choice that keeps the BBC skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals

But that is not the problem faced by those covering Israel and Palestine. Events can be fast-moving, but they are rarely new or unpredictable. The reporter’s task should be to explain and clarify the changing forms of the same, endlessly repeating central story: of Israel’s ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, and of Palestinian resistance.

The challenge is to make sense of Israel’s variations on a theme, whether it is dispossessing Palestinians through illegal settlement-building and expansion; army-backed settler attacks; building walls and cages for Palestinians; arbitrary arrests and night raids; the murder of Palestinians, including children and prominent figures; house demolitions; resource theft; humiliation; fostering a sense of hopelessness; or desecrating holy sites.

No one, least of all BBC reporters, should have been taken by surprise by this week’s events at Al-Aqsa.

The Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, when Al-Aqsa is at the heart of Islamic observance for Palestinians, coincided this year with the Jewish Passover holiday, as it did last year.

Passover is when Jewish religious extremists hope to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex to make animal sacrifices, recreating some imagined golden age in Judaism. Those extremists tried again this year, as they do every year — except this year, they had a police minister in Ben Gvir, leader of the fascist Jewish Power party, who is privately sympathetic to their cause.

Violent settler and army attacks on Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank, especially during the autumn olive harvest, are a staple of news reporting from the region, as is the intermittent bombing of Gaza or snipers shooting Palestinians protesting their mass incarceration by Israel.

It is an endless series of repetitions that the BBC has had decades to make sense of and find better ways to report.

It is not journalistic error or failure that is the problem. It is an editorial choice that keeps the British state broadcaster skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals, while Palestinian resistance is presented as tantrum-like behaviour, driven by uncontrollable, unintelligible urges that reflect hostility towards Jews rather than towards an oppressor Israeli state.

Tail of a mouse
Archbishop Tutu expanded on his point about siding with the oppressor. He added: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

This week, a conversation between Ben Gvir, the far-right, virulently anti-Arab police minister, and his police chief, Kobi Shabtai, was leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 News. Shabtai reportedly told Ben Gvir about his theory of the “Arab mind”, noting: “They murder each other. It’s in their nature. That’s the mentality of the Arabs.”

This conclusion — convenient for a police force that has abjectly failed to solve crimes within Palestinian communities — implies that the Arab mind is so deranged, so bloodthirsty, that brutal repression of the kind seen at Al-Aqsa is all police can do to keep a bare minimum of control.

Ben Gvir, meanwhile, believes a new “national guard” — a private militia he was recently promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — can help him to crush Palestinian resistance. Settler street thugs, his political allies, will finally be able to put on uniforms and have official licence for their anti-Arab violence.

This is the real context — the one that cannot be acknowledged by the BBC or other Western outlets — for the police storming of Al-Aqsa complex this week. It is the same context underpinning settlement expansion, night raids, checkpoints, the siege of Gaza, the murder of Palestinian journalists, and much, much more.

Jewish supremacism undergirds every Israeli state action towards Palestinians, tacitly approved by Western states and their media in the service of advancing Western colonialism in the oil-rich Middle East.

The BBC’s coverage this week, as in previous months and years, was not neutral, or even accurate. It was, as Tutu warned, a confidence trick — one meant to lull audiences into accepting Israeli violence as always justified, and Palestinian resistance as always abhorrent.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This article was first published at Middle East Eye and is republished with the permission of the author.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has condemned the Israeli police violence against Palestinians at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the holy city of Jerusalem, reports Anadolu News.

Widodo emphasised that the expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homes and the use of force against them at the Al Aqsa Mosque must not be ignored.

“Indonesia condemns such acts and urges the UN Security Council to take measures on the repeated violations carried out by Israel,” Widodo posted on his official Twitter handle.

Widodo added Indonesia would continue to stand with the people of Palestine.

Israeli police on Monday stormed the Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem and attacked the Palestinians who were on guard to prevent raids by extremist Jews.

Al Jazeera reports that the Israeli military has continued its bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip, targeting several areas after rockets were fired from the enclave.

Health authorities in Gaza said at least 32 Palestinians – including 10 children – were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Strip since late on Monday, after Hamas launched rockets from the coastal territory towards Israel.

Gaza ultimatum
The rocket fire came after Hamas, which rules Gaza, issued an ultimatum demanding Israel stand down its security forces from the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem after days of violence against Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Red Crescent said some of its employees were prevented from entering the Al Aqsa Mosque compound.

Thousands of Palestinians staged protests in the Al Aqsa Mosque complex, located in the old city of Jerusalem, after performing the dawn prayers on Monday. They stayed inside to guard the mosque from the raids of extremist Jews.

Setting up barricades at some points of Haram al-Sharif, the main building of Al Aqsa, they chanted slogans and said they would not leave there.

Extremist Jews had announced to storm Al Aqsa Mosque to celebrate the anniversary of the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, as “Jerusalem Day” according to the Hebrew calendar.

Extremist Jewish organisations had called for raids on Al Aqsa Mosque on Sunday and Monday to mark Jerusalem Day, to celebrate occupation anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar.

Police raided mosque
The Israeli police then raided the mosque, using tear gas shells, rubber bullets, and stun grenades in clashes with the Palestinians, who responded by throwing stones.

Palestinian resistance group Hamas has said that Israel was waging a “religious war against Palestinian worshippers” in the occupied city of Jerusalem.

“What is happening in the Al Aqsa Mosque at the time of storming and assaulting worshippers is proof of the brutality of the Zionist occupation,” Muhammad Hamadeh, the movement’s spokesman for the city of Jerusalem said.

He called on the Palestinians to “remain steadfast”.

The Hamas spokesman held Israel responsible for its “incursion into the Al Aqsa Mosque,” saying: “The occupation will pay a heavy price.”

In New Zealand, yesterday — World Keffiyeh Day — was marked by Green MPs in solidarity.

“We celebrate Palestinian culture, humanity, and life, as we continue to call for an end to the terrifying violence suffered right now in Palestine at the hands of Israeli forces and settlers. Our [government] must speak!” Golriz Ghahraman said in a social media posting.

Don’t be ‘complicit’, says PSNA
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto has called on the New Zealand government to make a strong statement, not be “complicit” with ethnic cleansing by remaining silent. The statement said:

“The Palestinian people deserve the New Zealand government’s voice on their side rather than our ‘complicity through silence’ which usually accompanies Israeli racism and systematic brutality against Palestinians.

“In speaking out we urge you not to use anaemic language such as ‘calling for calm’ or ‘urging restraint on both sides’ because those statements in effect mean New Zealand siding with Israel’s racist, ethnic cleansing policies.

“Please intervene with a strong, clear voice which condemns both Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine and the brutality meted out against them by the Israeli police and armed forces. New Zealand should be demanding equal rights and equal treatment for all people living under Israeli occupation and control.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

I woke up to the news and fear cut into me for my family in Israel.  Where are they right now?  I felt one moment of the fear that Palestinians live with.

No false equivalence: nothing about this is equal.

In video, Israeli police are heavily armed and armoured, backed by courts of ethnic law.

Palestinians stand their ground wearing T-shirts.  An armed charge into an unarmed crowd is not a “clash”, it is an assault.

Israeli soldiers have been vaccinated and most Palestinians have not. To hell with Israel’s legal responsibility. They knew that no state would hold them to it, and no state has.

But look — Palestinians are changing the script before our eyes.  They are taking authorship.

On May 8, 80,000 Palestinians came to Al Aqsa Mosque. Israeli police had violated their holy place and they came to reclaim it. They overwhelmed the roadblocks and the paramilitary police and faced them down with their bodies and their prayers.

Unstitching the Green Line
Palestinians protested in Ramallah and Jaffa, in Gaza and in Haifa.  They are unstitching the Green Line.  Palestinians and their allies are protesting around the world.

Thousands of Israelis have been filmed dancing this morning, delirious at the sight of fire in the Al Aqsa Mosque.

In 2014, Israelis sat on the hillsides of Sderot to watch the bombardment of Gaza.  I think their desensitised madness has spread; the soullessness that comes from wielding overwhelming violence with impunity.

Wait, look again. In Gaza there is danger of a different magnitude.

Gazan fighters fired rockets to join the uprising, to protest the forced expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.

I am not fond of rockets, but having seen both rockets and bombs in action, I would prefer to stand near a rocket than a one-ton bomb.  A rocket makes a hole in the ground, while the airborne bombs of the Israeli military (IDF) make the earth tremble.

“Israel conducted airstrikes in Gaza on Monday evening, following rocket fire from Gaza that caused damage to one Israeli vehicle, and ‘lightly injured’ one Israeli civilian, according to an Israeli army statement.”

Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans
Israeli bombs killed 21 Gazans overnight. They killed nine children, and injured scores of people. Let that attest to the relative value placed on one Israeli vehicle and 21 Gazan lives.

International governments condemned the rockets and elided the rest.

Israel, still drunk on its Trump licence, may believe it can bomb Gaza with impunity.  Gazans, with clarity and unfathomable endurance, with covid rampant behind a blockade wall, may feel they have less and less to lose.

This is a formula for catastrophe. We must not let it play out again. Gazans are no symbols to be held up as proof after the fact.  They are human beings under assault right now, and they need our protection.

Do not tut-tut them all to step back equally, because the inequality of the status quo ante was the cause:  a regime of dispossession, apartheid, blockade, ethnically determined lives and life prospects.

We need to respond to the cause and the crimes. We need to demand that our governments uphold the laws they sign in our names to clear the way forward – not back. Intervene, protect, invoke the law, end the Nakba.

Saturday may be Nakba Day, but Nakba is an event in the present tense until we – yes we, calling on law and justice with every means available – bring it to an end.

Marilyn Garson writes about Palestinian and Jewish dissent. This article was first published by Sh’ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices and is republished with permission. The original article can be read here.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz