The Nation
May 17, 2021
With the explosion of Israeli violence this last week, Palestinians are experiencing a level of terror that is both new and painfully reminiscent of the terror of 1948.
This article appears in the June 14/21, 2021 issue.
As the present crisis sweeps with ever greater violence across all of the territory over which the Israeli state desperately tries to project its power—from Acre in the north to Gaza in the south, and from the coastal cities of Haifa and Jaffa to the hills east of Jerusalem—a new set of political circumstances is coming into sharp focus.
To begin with, the violence this time is not just taking place—as it so often has in recent years—in absurdly lopsided “exchanges” of fire in and out of Gaza, pitting home-made Palestinian rockets against the large-scale devastation that only a modern army and air force can inflict. It is also taking place across what Benjamin Netanyahu recently referred to as the “second front” in cities long under Israeli control. Mobs of Jewish supremacists, sometimes protected and sometimes actively assisted by state security forces, have been terrorizing Palestinian citizens of the state: smashing their shops, marking the doors of their houses, breaking into their homes, dragging them from their cars and beating them savagely in the street. Such events are routine across the West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinian residents—carefully documented and tabulated each week by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs—is protected by the Israeli army and invariably goes unpunished by the state. But, especially on this scale, such unbridled violence is more unusual on the other side of the 1949–67 armistice line, in cities like Haifa or al-Lydd.