Palestine – olive picking under attack by settlers and Israeli Army tear gas
JVL Introduction
Jenny Kassman, an active member of JVL’s Antiracist Alliances Network, visits the West Bank regularly to support farmers and villagers during olive picking season. Things continue to worsen and here Jenny describes what she witnessed and experienced.
She says: “Over the 10 years I have been visiting Palestine, I have witnessed rapidly increasing settler and army violence, injustice and destruction which is only very rarely reported in the Western media. With the recent election of a far-right government in Israel, the plight of the Palestinians can be guaranteed to deteriorate still further with more deaths, more violence, more expropriation and more destruction”.”
How much worse it has to be before the international community takes action to support justice for Palestinians, rather than, at best, fine words of condemnation for such attacks?
This article was originally published by Morning Star on Wed 16 Nov 2022. Read the original here.
A nice hot day in Palestine
For a decade, JENNY KASSMAN has returned to the occupied West Bank to bear witness to the increasingly brutal treatment of native villagers by Israeli settlers and soldiers — without international pressure, the outlook remains bleak
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The settlers (colonialists) are mainly the descendants of European Jews. The obsession with ideas that Palestine is a sacred land gifted to European Jews by God, and therefore a cherished possession, sits oddly with historical fact. European Jews are descended from economic migrants who ingratiated themselves with the Roman Empire which occupied vast swathes of territory around the Mediterranean. The Jews left Palestine on Roman ships, seeking better opportunities, establishing trading communities around the Roman Empire, proselytizing and intermarrying with local inhabitants wherever they settled. The idea that Palestine was so precious did not deter those economic migrants leaving Palestine in search of better prospects then. The idea that Palestine is exclusively God’s gift to Jews and should not be defiled by non-Jews is a comparatively recent notion conveniently invented to justify persecution of Palestinians who are descendants of the Semitic tribes that originally lived in the area of Palestine, sharing the land with another well-known Semitic tribe we now call the Jews; who now mistakenly claim exclusive right to the area.
An excerpt From: Thought for the Day
Bishop James Jones – 18/11/2020
“I went to see the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. When I ventured that Jews might begin with Genesis he stopped me.
‘No, James. That’s a very Christian way of reading the Bible on this subject!’
‘No’, he repeated, ‘we start in Deuteronomy with God’s instruction to Moses that as they entered the Promised Land they were never to destroy a fruit bearing tree.’ Long before anyone knew the science of climate change there was a religious intuition that trees were central to our ecology.
Anyone notice the difference between the above pious statements and the reality revealed by Jamila’s experience in losing her olive tree: doubtless repeated countless times.