ISRAEL has been condemned for mounting a second brutal attack on worshippers at one of Islam’s holiest sites — the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), who were filmed on Tuesday using clubs and stun grenades to attack Palestinian worshippers, returned to the mosque on Wednesday for a repeat of the operation.
Human rights group Amnesty International UK said the second attack on al-Aqsa “illustrates the sheer brutality of Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians.”
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Heba Morayef of Amnesty said: “Once again, the Israeli security forces have shown the world what apartheid looks like.
“These orchestrated attacks demonstrate just how far the Israeli authorities will go to maintain their cruel system of apartheid.
“Israeli security forces have now subjected Palestinian worshippers to two consecutive nights of horror and turned one of the holiest sites in Islam into a crime scene.
ISRAELI police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem today, firing stun grenades at Palestinians inside who responded by throwing stones and firecrackers.
Outside the mosque’s gate, police dispersed crowds of young men with stun grenades and rubber bullets.
People arrested and later released from the compound said police had burst in and attacked worshippers, using truncheons, rifles and even chairs to strike men, women and children, with video footage appearing to confirm their accounts.
The Al Jazeera ‘Labour Files’ documentary series exposed afresh the rampant racism and war on democracy of the Labour right, both to sabotage the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and to purge the left from the party under Keir Starmer.
Now a new episode sees Martin Forde – the barrister Starmer reluctantly commissioned to investigate the report’s allegations and whose findings have been ignored by the Labour right and their media allies ever since – respond to the programme’s evidence and conclusions:
Watch and share widely.
The Labour Files – The Forde Response I Al Jazeera Investigations
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” warned one protester.
Ongoing protests against the far-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu were larger than ever on Saturday night as an estimated 200,000 people or more took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities to denounce judicial reforms they warn put the nation on a path towards dictatorship.
For over two months, weekly protests—mostly on the weekends but increasingly during the workweek as well—large demonstrations have taken place in response to Netanyahu and his coalition government pushing a judicial takeover that critics say would curtail democracy.
Haaretzreported Saturday’s turnout as a record since the movement started in early January.
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” Ophir Kubitsky, a 68-year-old high school teacher at the demonstration, toldReuters. “We came here to demonstrate over and over again until we win.”
An incredible photo.
Downtown Tel Aviv is flooded with Israelis protesting the government’s judicial reform package. pic.twitter.com/DntI4k16hV
The demonstrations in Tel Aviv and other locations “began peacefully,” reports Reuters. “However, footage released by police later showed protesters breaking down barriers in Tel Aviv and igniting fires as they blocked roads. Police sprayed water cannons at the protesters.”
While Israeli liberals increasingly register fear and discomfort over the direction of its government’s growing autocratic tendencies, Palestinian rights advocates have noted that the right-wing slide is a direct and predictable continuation of a system that denies its Palestinian citizens full rights under the law while overseeing a brutal and repressive apartheid regime.
As American-Palestinian scholar Yousef Munayyer recently wrote in a column about the protest movement for +972 Magazine:
As tens of thousands of Israelis protest the reforms that Netanyahu’s government seeks to ram through in hopes of “saving the essence” of Israeli democracy, they are largely avoiding a confrontation with the foundational problem, namely that the essence of the Israeli system is to put settler colonialism ahead of any liberal principles around democracy, equality, or human rights.
A key question for many concerned not only about Israel’s increasingly autocratic and right-wing lurch, but its ever-worsening treatment of the Palestinians living under hostile military occupation is this: “Does this loose group oppose the settler-colonial system that these legal reforms would further enable, or does it simply seek a return to the settler-colonial system, but without Netanyahu at its head?”
Munayyer believes all evidence thus far indicates the latter is the unfortunate answer, which is why Palestinians are noticeably absent from celebrating the display of dissent and opposition in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
“For all Palestinians, including those with Israeli citizenship, there is little urgency to try to ‘save’ Israeli democracy, primarily because for them it has never existed,” Munayyer concluded. “Not only is a political system that is constructed to be democratic toward some, but not all, not a democracy, it is also not going to seem worth saving to those it disadvantages.”
Noting that communities like Huwara are often targeted by Israeli settlers, Amnesty’s regional director urged Israel “to remove all settlements, which are war crimes under international law, and to dismantle its system of apartheid against Palestinians.”
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Friday called out Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for saying that Huwara, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, “needs to be wiped out” and “the state of Israel should do it.”
Smotrich’s comment Wednesday came after Israeli settlers on Sunday rampaged through Huwara, killing a 37-year-old Palestinian man—mass violence that came just hours after a Palestinian gunman murdered a pair of Israeli brothers, who were 19 and 21.
“As Jews who support freedom and dignity for all people, no exceptions, we will not just sit in horror as the state of Israel carries out ethnic cleansing in our names.”
Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers rallied and marched on the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday to protest his embrace of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid growing violence against Palestinians—violence that demonstrators said is enabled by the U.S. government’s unwavering military and diplomatic support.
“As Jews who support freedom and dignity for all people, no exceptions, we will not just sit in horror as the state of Israel carries out ethnic cleansing in our names,” said Jewish Voice for Peace member Jay Saper. “We are calling for an end to all U.S. military funding to Israel now.”
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos
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Shakespeare himself could not conceive of the dramatic fall from grace experienced by Jeremy Corbyn, under whose leadership between 2015 and 2019 the UK Labour Party could boast a mass membership of 600,000 to make it the largest political party in Europe, and under whose leadership Labour came within just under 2500 votes of winning the 2017 general election on a transformational programme of wealth redistribution, meaningful policies to end homelessness and poverty, and a foreign policy placing a priority on peace over war and hope over fear.
That his outstanding performance in 2017 came in the face of a concerted attempt by Labour Party officials to undermine his leadership and election campaign, and despite a treacherous PLP of unreconstructed bastards, this only makes the question of ‘What if?’ all the more salient and also tragic.
His successor, Starmer, went out of his way to court Corbyn’s supporters in order to get himself elected as leader, while announcing with the sincerity of a mafia boss that “Jeremy is a friend as well as a colleague.”
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The issue of antisemitism has again been weaponised to demonise the most principled anti-racist politician in Britain, again at the behest of an establishment of bastards in the eyes of which the Palestinian people are deemed children of a lesser God.
The issue within a Parliamentary Labour Party stacked full of apologists for apartheid and white supremacist Zionist ideology that underpins it, has never been antipathy towards Jewish people; it has and continues to be the thoroughly dishonest smearing of those who dare stand in solidarity with the Palestinians and their just struggle against occupation, siege, and the most sustained apparatus of injustice in modern history.
23/2/23 The quote “Jeremy is a friend as well as a colleague.” appears not quite correct. Unless it’s quoting a different occasion it should be “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, & who’s a friend as well as a colleague”. I wouldn’t truncate it like that without making it clear, that’s your academic rigour eh? Can be watched here
When Starmer succeeded Jeremy in 2020 he said “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, & who’s a friend as well as a colleague" What happened? pic.twitter.com/MTdLESB5qN
"I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our Party through some really difficult times. Who energised our movement and who's a friend as well as a colleague."
I suspect Starmer had to double-mask during the pandemic, because he's a two-faced Tory fraud and stooge. pic.twitter.com/YgnzJUCbvW
