By David Hearst
Ten years ago, I walked down a tiled pathway in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood
and was led into a room where an old woman was sitting amid a pile of boxes and
packed suitcases.
The first thing I noticed about Rifqa al-Kurd was the burning
intensity of her eyes. She told me that she lived out of boxes because she was
expecting the police to throw her out of house and for the settlers to move in
at any moment. When that happened, she explained, she did not want her clothes
thrown into the street. Hence the packed bags.
She had been through this before, when she was evicted from her home in Haifa in 1948. What kept her there, sitting among her boxes? She gave a one word reply: "Sumud", which roughly translates as steadfastness.
Rifqa died last year, still in the home that had been given to her
by the Jordanian government and UNWRA. Her son Nabil explained to me how
settlers had moved into an extension he built, which the municipal authorities
said was illegal.
Nabil, somewhat greyer now, has taken his mother’s place standing
picket outside their house, number 13, next to a wall, graffitied with "We
will not leave" in Arabic. His daughter and Rifqa’s granddaughter, Mona
al-Kurd, filmed the video that has since gone viral of Jewish settlers with
thick Brooklyn accents barging their way into her home: "If I don’t steal
your home, someone else will steal it," one said.
Far from over
When I met the al-Kurd family and wrote about Rifqa, no one took
the slightest notice of her or Sheikh Jarrah. I had to explain to my editor
where Sheikh Jarrah was and even then, I don’t think he got it. The Arab Spring
was the only story in town, and not for the first time, Palestinians were told
their conflict was old news.
Today, Sheikh Jarrah is the subject of statements from the UN, the
US State Department, and politicians across the spectrum in Britain.
Demonstrations are being held in Downing Street, Chicago and Berlin. And Mona
al-Kurd has a global online audience. So, I can personally attest to one fact
about the last few days of mayhem in Sheikh Jarrah, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the
Damascus Gate: Israel is far from done with the Palestinian conflict.
Last year, Israel's national religious right proclaimed that it had
won this conflict and that the Palestinians should do the decent thing, and
come out waving a white flag. Former US President Donald Trump’s recognition of
Jerusalem as the capital of Israel turned the opening of the US embassy partly into
an evangelical service, partly into a victory parade. "What a glorious day
for Israel. We are in Jerusalem and we are here to stay," Jared Kushner
proclaimed at the opening ceremony. In Gaza on the same day, as Kushner crowed,
more than 50 people were killed by Israeli forces.
Then came the so-called Abraham Accords when the United Arab
Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.
In an op-ed in the New York Times and in reply to the late Saeb
Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, Israel’s then UN ambassador Danny
Danon wrote: "What’s wrong with Palestinian surrender? …A national suicide
of the Palestinians’ current political and cultural ethos is precisely what is
needed for peace."
But if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought then he
could bury the Palestinian state by dealing with the Emirati or Bahraini one,
by getting Sudan taken off the terrorist list, or having Washington recognize
Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, he must now be realising how little
that meant, how little in reality his newly acquired Arab assets are worth.
Enough is enough
These Arab leaders have no credibility with their own people, even
less with the Palestinians. To ever have thought otherwise was Netanyahu’s
grand illusion. A new generation of Palestinians is rising under his nose,
which no amount of skunk water, tear gas, and sound grenades will stop. There
is a Mona al-Kurd on every street corner.
How did they get there? Who raised them? Who incited them?
The soldiers who arrest them nightly; the courts which have decided
settlers are the true owners of their homes, or who issue the demolition
orders; the city municipality which carries them out; The City of David
Foundation, El Ad, which advances territorial claims through archaeology and housing
for settlers in Silwan; the mobs of far-right Jewish youths who shout:
"Death to the Arabs"; or the city’s deputy mayor Arieh King, who told
a Palestinian activist that it was a pity he wasn’t shot in the head.
This education in hatred is the result of a truly
multi-disciplinary effort by Israel's different institutions and at all levels.
It has gone on all their lives. Now this generation is saying: "Enough is
enough." To them, it matters not how many times Israeli police throw sound
grenades at medics treating the injured, at worshippers inside Al-Aqsa mosque
or at women and children in the streets of the Old City.
They will return night after night to Al-Aqsa. Without a stone
being thrown, their presence proves that East Jerusalem is under occupation and
will always be so until liberated from Israeli control. But stones will be
thrown and much else besides. There were large demonstrations in the West Bank
and a volley of rockets fired from Gaza. On Tuesday, 25 Palestinians, including
nine children, were killed in Israeli air strikes on the enclave. Two Israeli
women have also died.
If the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas talks and behaves like a
rabbit caught in the headlights, faced with a people he has lost all authority
over, the same is not true of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Key features
There are three features that give this protest added potency, and
that should cause alarm to the Israeli security establishment. The first is
that as a direct result of the latest wave of normalization with Israel, no
Palestinian is under any illusion that an Arab state will come to even their
rhetorical rescue.
This was not the case in previous intifadas. There are no honest
brokers any more. The Palestinians know they are well and truly on their own,
and each can only rely on the resources available to them.
The second is that unlike previous uprisings, every Palestinian is
involved. From 1948, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora. The
protests in al-Aqsa attract Christians as well as Muslims, secular as well as
religious, nationalist as well as Islamist. They come from Haifa and Jaffa as
well as Jerusalem.
If the buses carrying them are stopped on the motorway,
Jerusalemites come and pick them up in their cars. They have different status
under Israeli law. Some have Israeli passports and are citizens, others have
Jerusalem resident permits. Israel has undone all of the work it put into the
strategy of divide and rule. It has united them all.
All feel the same fire and express the same passion. All call
themselves Palestinian. Each and everyone of them knows what the stakes are.
The third and crucial difference is that this movement is centred
on Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem. No matter how many times the police clear the mosque,
and they have now done it three times,
it will refill with Palestinians more determined to protect it by stepping into
the shoes of those who have been injured or arrested.
A new uprising
Picking Jerusalem as the place to declare an end of conflict last
year was the most fundamental error Netanyahu and the settlers could have made.
Of course they can use, and have used, maximum force, but they will learn to
question the utility of doing so.
By making East Jerusalem the focus of the next round of settlement,
and openly and brazenly justifying it, they have ignited a flame that can only
grow throughout the Muslim world. And it's a flame they can not control. No one
expressed this more fiercely or eloquently on Monday than Um Samir Abdellatif,
an elderly resident of one of the 28 homes threatened with eviction in Sheikh
Jarrah.
In an interview with Al Jazeera on Monday, Um Samir said she knew
the Arab world could not do anything for them. "But we do not lean on
anyone, because we will, with our own hands, resist the occupation. God
willing, we will keep resisting until the very last moment of our lives.
"My heart is on fire from the amount of hypocrisy and claims
that these lands are theirs. And they know, with every fibre of their beings,
that what they are saying is lies. This is Zionism, it has nothing to do with
Judaism. People say that we fight against Judaism, but we don’t, we always have
good relations with Christians and Jews, we have always been good with each
other. But we reject occupation, reject it, reject it totally."
Thus are sown the seeds of a new uprising.
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