PALESTINE: Escalation of Deliberate Israeli Violence; SF Bay Area Emergency Demonstration for Palestine on 3/10

Posted on March 6, 2023

By Dominique Ferré

February 25 – The Israeli army killed 11 Palestinians in Nablus (West Bank) on February 22. Sixty Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the year. What is the cause of this escalation?

After Jenin and Jericho, it was in Nablus, in the north of the West Bank, that the Israeli army unleashed its violence, leaving 11 dead and more than 100 injured. B’Tselem, the main Israeli human rights organization denounced this assault: “Israeli forces have killed 60 Palestinians since the beginning of 2023, an average of more than one murder per day. The international community is allowing this, and the United States has just covered for Israel at the UN Security Council.” (February 23)

Israel’s repeated attacks owe nothing to chance. The Israeli State is in the grip of an internal crisis that is tearing the whole society apart from the bottom up. The crisis pits supporters of the new far-right government against those who, in large weekly demonstrations, claim to oppose it with “democratic values” — without ever questioning, however, what B’Tselem describes as “the Apartheid regime that rules between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.”

In the Israeli daily Haaretz, journalist Amira Hass asks: “Is there a link between the bloody raids of the past few months in Jenin, Jericho and Nablus, and the overthrow of the judicial system by the Netanyahu government?” (February 23)

The Electronic Intifada addresses this question: “According to some knowledgeable observers, the new far-right government in Tel Aviv may be deliberately seeking an escalation of violence in order to provide a pretext to implement its goals of annexing land in the West Bank and consolidating its colonial and Apartheid regime.”

The Palestinian people responded to the Nablus massacres with a general strike – a general strike that was taking place, according to Israeli news outlets, at the very same moment that “senior aides of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas were holding secret talks.

These negotiations were negotiated directly through the Biden administration and continued after the Jenin massacre on January 26, when Abbas said he had ended his “security cooperation” with the State of Israel.

Can there be a democratic solution, or are the people of Palestine doomed to this spiral of massacres?

To this question, the “One Democratic State” campaign answers as follows:

“Palestinians and Jews who oppose Apartheid and colonialism must continue to build a united resistance movement. They must not be distracted by protests that only legitimize a false democracy and actually reinforce its repressive system of colonization and control. This movement must propose a clear alternative: the construction of a single democratic State in Palestine, historically on the ruins of the Apartheid regime.”(February 21)

(article reprinted/translated from Issue No. 379 of Tribune des Travailleurs / Workers Tribune)