Challenging Israel’s Occupation, Palestinians Create ‘Gate of the Sun’ Village

[Jefferson23]

January 15, 2013

In the small hours of Sunday, more than 500 Israeli police surrounded around 130 Palestinian activists at a protest camp on the hills opposite the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

The camp, which the activists called the village of Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), was set up on privately-owned Palestinian land two days before to protest against the Israeli occupation and continued expansion of illegal settlements, which goes hand in hand with forced evictions in the West Bank.

Heavily armed police moved into the village to remove the peaceful activists on orders from the Israeli government, despite a High Court ruling on Friday not to remove the camp.

Eventually the video stream I was watching was cut off, but it was still possible to follow Twitter, where activists reported on the arrests and eviction moment by moment.

in full: http://blog.amnestyusa.org/middle-east/challenging-israels-occupation-palestinians-create-gate-of-the-sun-village/

[Berlum]

1. Sounds like a place in a sic-fi novel - Gate of the Sun

[oberliner]

2. Good stuff

Non-violence resistance is the way to go. Hopefully this movement will grow and eclipse those who espouse rock-throwing and other violence as a means of protest.

Were that to occur, freedom and peace-minded Palestinians would probably have a much greater chance of achieving their goals.

[Scootaloo]

3. Stokely Carmichael has a quote about that...

Dr. King’s policy was that non-violence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His main assumption was that if you were non-violent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The US has none.

There are of course certainly Israelis with a conscience towards Palestinians. They just happen to not be in charge. Or loud. Or even voters, from what I'm starting to understand (it seems Israeli progressives have more of a "why bother?" attitude towards voting than US progressives do). Unfortunately, the foundational principle of Israel - Zionism - is reliant on the utter and complete dehumanization of the Palestinian people. Without that dehumanization, without stripping Zionists of all empathy for those people, the whole "Zionist experiment" falls apart, as even basic empathy makes Israel's treatment of the Palestinians unacceptable for ethical people.

The current strain of Palestinian violence obviously isn't going to change anything for them, no. But so long as Israeli society is dominated by the attitude that calls the Palestinians "drunken cockroaches in a bottle," so long as advocacy for utter destruction of Gaza is tolerated - as it is from Gilad Sharon, among others - then Palestinian nonviolence will be equally unproductive.

Only two things will help Palestinian nonviolence: if Israeli society were to shed its ingrained hatred of Palestinians, and seeing them as human beings worthy of consideration stopped leading to a person being called a "self-hating Jew"; or if the US would back off and allow international pressure to accomplish in Israel what it did in South Africa.