Netanyahu’s Zionist Israel

Ben Gvir, Israel’s new Minister of National Security, entered the Al Aqsa Mosque one week after Netanyahu took oath from the most far-right coalition in Israel, yelling “the government of Israel will not give in to an organization of murderers, to a despicable terrorist organization” — disregarding the anguish this will bring upon the Palestinians, disregarding that a similar act done by Ariel Sharon had incited the 2^nd Intifada in 2000.

Gvir incites violence against Palestinians all the time. A portrait of 1994 Israeli-American Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125, hangs in his living room. After four years and five failed elections in the country, Netanyahu has returned to power by making alliance with Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party — the most far-right extremist coalition of Israel’s history.

Both Smotrich and Gvir trumpet the ideas of getting the ‘Promised Land’ clear of Palestinians simply by stealing more and more of their land by way of illegal settlements, and later by the annexation of the whole of Palestine. Gvir outright opposes Palestinian statehood, and proports a one-state-solution, probably one that has killed all the Palestinians.

Smotrich, now the new finance minister, told the Knesset last year that Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and kicked all Arabs out of the country when it was founded. He runs the NGO Regavim that stops Palestinians from constructing homes in the West Bank without Israeli permits. Both these men live deep inside West Bank settlements and have often led raids by settlers into the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

Already, within weeks in power, Israeli government has announced that developing settlement in all parts of the land of Israel, including Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights and West Bank, will be a ‘top priority’; Smotrich has cut down the Palestinian Authority’s budget, suspended its officials’ travel permits; Gvir has ordered Israeli police to remove all Palestinian flags in occupied East Jerusalem!

Reportedly, in 2015, Gvir was part of the ‘wedding of hate’ where he, the groom and others had been filmed dancing around, stabbing a picture of a Palestinian baby murdered by a settler in a firebombing in the West Bank village few days earlier. Now Gvir is Head of Security, which will also give him control of Israeli prisons.

Israeli prisons are already exemplar torture centres. They are known to practise techniques like ‘positional torture’, beatings, solitary confinements, sleep deprivation, sexual torture, verbal sexual harassment, threats and what not. The Israeli law facilitates and even honours Israeli soldiers who commit torture and killing of Palestinians, and allows all types of tortures in prison. One can imagine if thousands are held in such prisons and put in such extreme conditions, what will they come out to be? Will they be like normal people, or will they be filled with shame, anger and revenge?

Torturing and killing Palestinians is like a hobby for Israeli soldiers. Torture and abuse at checkpoints, raids on refugee camps and villages, night riads into homes when families are sleeping, strangulating and kicking Palestinians in the streets, pointing guns on them, shooting at them, killing them, raiding the Al Aqsa Mosque… all this is normal for the Palestinians. Like several others who report on Israeli human rights abuse of Palestinians, Al Shabaka reports, “Israeli soldiers arrested Arbeed at his home in Ramallah on September 25, 2019. They beat him severely before taking him to Al Moscobiyye detention center in Jerusalem for interrogation. Two days later, according to his lawyer, he was hospitalized as a result of severe torture, and lay in critical condition for several weeks… they arrested 40 students that month.” If all this is normal then what are the Palestinians going to face at the hands of an extremists far-right Zionist, ultra-Jewish group of parties in power now!

Reportedly 222 Palestinians have been killed in 2022 alone, but according to some analysts, Israel is killing one Palestinian every day!

The new year has started for the Palestinians already with 14 deaths in less than three weeks. On Tuesday, 14-year-old Omar Khmour was shot in the head and killed near Bethlehem in a raid in the Dheisheh refugee camp. The Israeli army says they opened fire after suspects hurled rocks and molotov cocktails at the troops — so proven that the 14-year-old was a terrorist!

For Gvir and the likes, all Palestinians are terrorists, hence they should be exterminated from life and from the map of the world. Though Netanyahu has said he will safeguard civil rights and will not allow any harm to the country’s Palestinian minority, this will obviously prove to be a cliché, as he himself is under an ongoing trial on corruption charges and is attempting to undermine the Israeli judiciary in his favour. Just imagine, a system, corrupt from inside out, is hell bent on the systematic genocide of a segment of humanity that they have occupied, that they compulsively torture every day, and upon whose blood they are tempted to play more barbaric orgy!

This because another segment of humanity, the UN, had inherited the ‘Mandate of Palestine’ from another segment, the League of Nations. This because another part of humanity, Britain, had made the ‘Balfour Declaration’ an essential instrument of the League. This because the Brits and the Jews take the ‘return to Zion’ as a major pillar of their foreign policy, however secular they pose to be! And this because Britain shamelessly celebrated the Centenary of the Balfour Declaration in 2017. And because this is a vital pillar of another segment of humanity, the US and their allies — meaning that all these parts of humanity join the wild orgy that feed on the torment, anguish and blood of Palestinians!

And this because no other segment of humanity has the will to resist the bloodshed and extreme human rights abuse of the Palestinians!

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2023.

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