Ramadan Nakba for Palestinians: Whither Biden’s human rights credentials?

The house of cards Israel has built projecting itself as the victim surrounded by Arab enemies is fast crumbling in the social media. For decades, with its money power and media control, Israel has continued the charade playing victim while it continued crimes against humanity in occupied Palestine, systematically denying the Palestinian people their right to life, health, education, property and dignity. Add to this long list of lost freedoms the Palestinians’ right to reclaim their lands robbed from them in broad daylight with the help of the liberal West, which promotes itself as the watchdog of human rights only to hide its own skeletons in the cupboard.

As the Palestinian people, after a month-long Ramadan fast, observed another Eid ul Fitr festival yesterday under occupation with freedom denied while they ran towards not-to-be found shelters in the Gaza Strip to protect themselves from Israeli missiles raining on them, the mainstream US media, most of them in the firm control of Zionist ownership, continue the sham to whitewash Israeli crimes, demonise the Palestinian people and demean their freedom struggle. 

Western governments were quick to condemn Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel but no such condemnations came when Israeli missiles killed Palestinian civilians, including more than a dozen children, in Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated regions. In a presidential statement, the new US administration promoting itself as an international human rights champion exposed its empty core by openly throwing its weight behind Israel which violates the human rights of the Palestinian people with impunity. 

As US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar rightly pointed out in a tweet, there was no mention of Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where the Palestinians are facing eviction; there was no mention of Israel’s raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque; and no mention of the killing of Palestinian children. “You aren’t prioritizing human rights. You are siding with an oppressive occupation,” the Democratic Congresswoman said in her tweet directed at President Joe Biden.

In his two paragraph statement following his phone call of support to Israel’s hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden condemned only the rocket attacks by “Hamas and other terrorist groups.” He conveyed his administration’s unwavering support for Israel’s security and its legitimate right to defend itself and its people.
If only he had added a line to remind Israel that under international law, the Palestinian people have the right to resist occupation and oppression, then global justice activists would have saluted him for his courageous stand. But alas, Biden is no different from his predecessor Donald Trump, who upended the Middle East peace process by recognizing occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in contravention of international law. Will someone tell Biden that selective human rights promotion is indeed human rights violation?

However, in social media platforms, Israel is losing its propaganda war despite Twitter and Instagram temporarily blocking the Palestinian narrative that explained the cause of the current crisis. The social media giants later conveniently attributed the deletion of posts and the suspension of accounts to an “error by our automated systems”. In May last year, Facebook, without giving a valid reason, removed dozens of pages maintained by Palestinian activists who highlighted Israeli atrocities. 

While the mainstream Western media are focused on what is happening in Gaza with their usual pro-Israeli bias, rarely mentioned is what triggered the current conflict in the West Bank. It all began with a social media video that went viral. It showed a young Palestinian woman from Sheikh Jarrah braving an Israeli settler who had trespassed into her premises and telling him in English “Jacob, you are stealing my house.” The Jewish settler replies, “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it.” 

The conversation took place ahead of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling – which has now been postponed -- on an appeal against a move to evict the Palestinians from their homes where they have been living for decades after they were expelled from Haifa and Jaffa during the 1948 war in keeping with Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy. After they became refugees in 1948, Jordan which was the then custodian of the West Bank territories built them houses in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silivan. 

Now that East Jerusalem has been illegally annexed and the whole of Jerusalem declared by Israel as the undivided capital of the Zionist state, Israeli settlers want the Palestinians evicted from Sheikh Jarrah and other places for them to move in. This is seen as the continuation of what Palestinians call An-Nakba or the Catastrophe that began with the eviction of 780,000 Palestinians at gun point from their villages and the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in villages such as Deir Yassin just days and weeks before Israel declared itself as an independent state on May 14, 1948.  

While the Sheikh Jarrah issue was simmering with Israeli settlers planning their annual march of provocation through Palestinian areas, tension was building up outside the Damascus Gate of the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site after the two mosques in Makkah and Madina. Since the beginning of the Ramadan this year, Palestinian civilians had been gathering outside the Damascus Gate, demanding that the occupation force lift the restrictions on the right to worship at Al-Aqsa mosque.  

The tensions culminated in Israeli forces storming the Al-Aqsa mosque and attacking the Palestinians engaged in prayers on Ramadan’s holiest night known as Lailathul Qadr. The East Jerusalem clashes between Israeli police armed with sophisticated guns, stun grenades and skunk water and the Palestinian youths armed with stones continued for the next two days. The crisis deepened when angry Palestinians 115 km away in the Gaza Strip responded by firing at Israel crude rockets which had little chance of penetrating Israeli’s hi-tech Iron Dome defence shield. Israel says the rockets killed five people, including a child.

Grabbing this opportunity to boost his sagging popularity, Netanyahu put the country on war footing and amassed a large force on the outskirts of Gaza in what could be a preparation for a major war against a poorly armed Palestinians living in squalid conditions in what is described as the world’s largest open-air prison.
What is urgently required is an international effort to de-escalate the crisis, but the Biden administration, like its predecessors, is aiding and abetting the massacre of Palestinian civilians by blocking United Nations Security Council peace efforts. 

On Wednesday at the Security Council meeting, UN Middle East Peace Envoy Tor Wennesland presented a report on the crisis, but the Biden administration, which has now openly exposed its fake human rights credentials, blocked its adoption and a resolution calling on Israel to “cease settlement activities, demolitions and evictions” in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods. The resolution was drafted by Tunisia and Norway, the architect of the 1993 peace accord which Israel killed.

It is high time the world condemned not only Israel but its main protector – the Biden administration – and expose their deception that undermines the world peace we urgently require to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact.