political discourse could be seen in the two main speeches by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leader of the opposition, Yitzhak Herzog, given on Tuesday at the Knesset.
Netanyahu explained very well why the Palestinian desperation will produce more and more Intifadas in the future and why Israel’s international delegitimisation will increase exponentially.
He described 100 years of colonisation as a proud project that for no good reason, other than Islamic incitement, was resisted by the native people of Palestine.
The message to the Palestinians was clear: Accept your fate as invisible, citizen-less inmates of the biggest prison on earth in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and as a community under a severe apartheid regime, and we can all live in peace. Any attempt to reject this reality is terrorism of the worst kind and will be dealt with accordingly.
Within this narrative, if his speechwriter was attempting to calm down worries in the Muslim world about the fate of al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), the opposite message came through. Much of his speech about al-Haram al-Sharif was a history lesson on why the place belongs to the Jewish people.
And although he ended this section with a promise not to change the status quo, the presence of the leaders of a party strongly believing in the need to build a third temple there was hardly reassuring.
In his speech, Herzog, the leader of the liberal Zionist opposition, manifested the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in a different way. His nightmare, he stressed repeatedly, was a country where Jews and Palestinians would live together.
Therefore, separation, ghettoisation, and enclaves are the best solution, even if it means shrinking a bit of greater Israel. “We are here, and they are there,” he repeated Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres’ famous slogan from the late 1990s
Haaretz’s liberal Zionist journalist, Barak Ravid, repeated the horror of liberal Zionists: If you have a binational state, stabbings will be a daily occurrence, he warned. The idea that a liberated Israel/Palestine will be a democracy for all has never been on the liberal Zionist agenda.
This wish not to share life with anything Arab is an attitude felt by every Palestinian on a daily basis. More than a century of colonisation and nothing has changed in the complete denial of the native Palestinians’ humanity or their right to the place.
It was Israeli policy and actions against Al-Aqsa Mosque that ignited the present wave of protests and individual attacks. But it was triggered by a century-long atrocity: the incremental culturecide of Palestine.
The western world was horrified by the destruction of ancient cultural gems by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). The Israeli destruction and wiping out of the Islamic heritage of Palestine was far more extensive and significant. Hardly one mosque remained intact after the Nakba, and many of those remaining were turned into restaurants, discotheques, and farms.
The Palestinians’ attempt to revive their theatrical and literary heritage is considered by Israel as a commemoration of the Nakba, and is outlawed if undertaken by anybody who relies on governmental funding.
What we see – and will continue to see – in Palestine is the existential struggle of the native people of a country still under threat of destruction.
This article originally appeared as: ‘Israeli colonisation is at the root of the violence’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com
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