The footage is harrowing. Drones launching missiles over people’s homes. The front doors of a hospital pelted with tear gas. Young children in tears fleeing their homes in the middle of the night, arms raised high in surrender. Israeli bulldozers ripping up roads. It is time we stopped being bystanders to these atrocities and stepped in to deliver a different future for young Palestinians – the same we demand for Ukrainians – one of self-determination, freedom, and security.
Israel has announced it is pulling its thousand troops out of a West Bank refugee camp, but like the Terminator, has promised it will be back.
While this week marks a horrific escalation, for 18 months the Israeli military have been raiding refugee camps throughout the occupied West Bank, waking up communities in the middle of the night. Nearly 500 people have been killed, 50 of them children.
As a Palestinian thousands of kilometres away, I can’t stop looking at the faces of the 11 youths who were shot and killed during the raid on Jenin this week – the youngest was only 16 and the oldest 23. My three children are this age – I can barely imagine the horror of suddenly having your child ripped away, a child you have loved to the brink of adulthood, all the hopes you hold extinguished by a soldier of the Israeli occupation.
All of these youths were born after the Oslo Accords, after the famous handshake on the White House lawn 30 years ago. Under that plan Palestine was supposed to be an independent state before these boys had even started school, but instead they lived every single day of their short lives with Israel’s military and its apartheid laws controlling every aspect of their lives – from their birth certificates through to the moment of their deaths.
The world has failed these young men. They have failed to ensure their childhoods were full of opportunity and safety. They have even failed to provide a pathway where they can see a future of self-determination and freedom, a life without checkpoints and soldiers. Like so many young men throughout history fighting colonial and racist occupiers, some young Palestinian men have concluded the best use of their lives is to sacrifice it for the sake of Palestinian freedom. They have chosen the liberation that death affords over a life of subjugation, oppression and apartheid.
Under the Oslo accords the Israeli military shouldn’t be anywhere near Jenin, and its refugee camp that was established by the UN for those Palestinians brutally ethnically cleansed from their homes during the establishment of Israel in 1948. But this week thousands of soldiers were part of a full-scale military attack on the refugee camp.
The footage is harrowing. Drones launching missiles over people’s homes. Israeli snipers taking out reporters’ video cameras (see also International Federation of Journalists report). The front doors of a hospital pelted with tear gas. Young children in tears fleeing their homes in the middle of the night, with a pet under one arm and the other raised high in surrender. Israeli bulldozers ripping up roads where 18,000 people already live precarious lives. Today the water and the electricity are off, the schools are closed, the ICRC having evacuated thousands of people to shelter in nearby schools or on the floors of Palestinian people’s homes. There is outrage even in Israel over the prevention of access for paramedics and the wilful targeting of journalists.
But today Israel will go back to business as usual. Rather than ending its illegal 56-year military occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, it will continue to plant settlers there, with more than 750,000 now living in what should be Palestine. Israeli MPs from the Prime Minister down will congratulate soldiers for ‘mowing the grass’ – Israeli military parlance for their regular military assaults on Palestinians. Illegal settlers in the West Bank will continue their rampages through Palestinian communities setting fire to Palestinian homes, olive groves and cars, often guarded by Israeli soldiers, and rarely, if ever, held accountable.
But there are 11 young Palestinians who are dead.
This isn’t the end of another “cycle of violence”. Occupation IS the engine of this violence. Every day for decades and decades it has been built on death after Palestinian death. For decades, Palestinians have been born at the point of an Israeli gun barrel, while the world talks about negotiations between “the two parties”.
While the Geneva Conventions have rules for military occupations, Israel’s extended occupation demands a special response from the international community. Israel, as the occupying power, is responsible for the people it occupies, but Israel has for decades manifestly failed to meet this responsibility. It therefore falls to nations who want peace to act and remove this responsibility from Israel’s hands.
It is time we stopped being bystanders to these atrocities and stepped in to deliver a different future for young Palestinians – the same we demand for Ukrainians – one of self-determination, freedom, and security.
Nasser is the son of a Palestinian refugee. He is president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, a co-founder of Australians For Palestine and a founding board member of Olive Kids. With his father’s legacy in mind, Nasser is determined to continue the struggle for justice and a free Palestine.