Mazin Qumsiyeh writes:

There has been a significant escalation of violence in apartheid Israel in the past few days. If this is a new uprising, that would hardly be surprising, given that, on average, we we have had one uprising every 10 years (nearly 14 in the past 140 years of the Zionist onslaught).

When we analyse the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back in this particular wave of unrest, we see the arson attack of 31 July 2015 on the Dawabsheh family home (father, mother and child murdered) and the calls for revenge as key. Since then, some 30 Palestinians have been killed, as have four Israelis.

Settler provocations

The past week saw a further escalation that started with the storming of the Al-Aqsa mosque area by extremist settlers who want to destroy the mosque to build a Jewish temple. A Jewish settler husband and wife were killed by a cell from Hamas (probably acting without direct orders from the group). They were residents of an illegal Israeli colony built on stolen Palestinian land; the husband was a senior Israeli officer and the wife also served in the Israeli army. Whether one supports such actions or not, they predictably unleashed a torrent of settler revenge attacks supported by the Israeli army.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, returned from his US tour after receiving the green light from Washington for ethnically cleansing Jerusalem and killing Palestinians. He told his commanders to shoot any Palestinian throwing stones, and if they arrest such youth to give them mandatory minimum sentences of four years imprisonment.

The Jewish settlers and soldiers also received the green light to torch cars, shoot civilians, burn crops and more. Tensions escalated, and 650 Palestinian civilians were injured and many killed.

Cold-blooded murder

Here in Bethlehem a 13-year-old child, Abdelrahman Obeidallah, was gunned down while he was returning from school. Pictures showed he was not participating in the demonstration. It is hard to justify shooting a child who is not posing a threat. I cried as I paid a visit and extended condolences to his father and other family members.

In a videotaped incident in Jerusalem, a young man who was posing no threat was clearly executed. Israeli settlers chased 19-year-old Fadi Alloon while he was heading for his early morning prayers. He tried to get protection even from Israeli police officers but the settlers screamed at the police and told them to shoot him. The police obeyed the settlers’ orders, even though the victim posed no threat to anyone. Full evidence of the Nazi like behaviour, with translation from Hebrew by Ronni Barkan, can be seen in the video below:

The murderers, as in thousands of similar incidents, will remain free and even be praised for their actions.

Expanding the Jews-only state

It is now clear that there is an orchestrated campaign to destroy the indigenous presence here and to extend the geography and hegemony of the racist “Jewish state”, but the Western media have done little or no reporting on what is really happening. The few local reporters trying to cover events are targeted physically and shot at regularly.

The Israeli military occupiers have decided to close down the Old City of Jerusalem to Palestinians while allowing Israeli Jews to rampage, taunt and attack the native Jerusalemites, Christians and Muslims. This behaviour demonstrates once again how deep Israel has sunk into fascism and apartheid.

Palestinians rightly wonder why the cell that fire-bombed the Dawabsheh family is still free while those who killed the settler couple were tracked down within 24 hours? Denying a city to the native people while opening it up for the colonisers is against international law. Murdering at will, injuring hundreds, kidnapping citizens (600 in September alone) and holding them for months and years without trial, torturing people, demolishing homes – these are all war crimes committed on illegally occupied territory.

Many consider what is happening now as the start of a new – the 14th – uprising against the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. The conditions for an uprising are indeed there, and I explain in detail in my book the trajectory of this.