![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Ayman-wounded-w-cops-lighter-e1484761473112.jpeg\")
\nHere is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys\u00a0the situation\u00a0of Palestinians \u2013 these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel \u2013 more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian politician in Israel.<\/p>\n
Israeli police have just\u00a0shot him with rubber-tipped bullets, not once but twice – including to\u00a0the face. Odeh is one of\u00a0the least confrontational politicians among\u00a0Israel’s\u00a0large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population. His message is consistently one of\u00a0peace and amity\u00a0between all Israeli citizens, whether Jews or Palestinians. That does not seem to have protected him from the shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach of Israel’s security forces\u00a0towards Palestinians.<\/p>\n
This image should be as shocking as seeing a bloodied\u00a0Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn crawling in the dirt, watched impassively by US or\u00a0UK police.<\/p>\n
Context is important too. Odeh had joined the 1,000 inhabitants of Umm al-Hiran \u2013 all Palestinian citizens of Israel \u2013 early this morning in a demonstration to stop demolition crews destroying the\u00a0150 homes of\u00a0their village\u00a0in the Negev. Israel allowed\u00a0these families to move to the area of Umm al-Hiran in the 1950s\u00a0after it had driven them from their original, and much more substantial, lands during the Nakba. The\u00a0pretext then for expelling\u00a0them was that\u00a0Israel needed their ancestral\u00a0lands for\u00a0an exclusively Jewish kibbutz.<\/p>\n
That all occurred during a military government that ruled over Israel’s Palestinians for nearly two decades. More than 60 years later, exactly the same thing is happening again, but this time in front of the cameras. Umm al-Hiran is being destroyed so that an exclusively Jewish community, with the\u00a0same name of Hiran, can be built over these families’\u00a0homes. Israel never issued Umm al-Hiran with a master plan, so now it can be declared illegal and its inhabitants called “squatters” and “trespassers”. The families are being ethnically cleansed a second time \u2013 not during hostilities or in a time of war, but by their own\u00a0state in a time of peace.<\/p>\n
They are far from alone. Thousands of other\u00a0families,\u00a0and their\u00a0villages, face the same fate.<\/p>\n
The truth is nothing has changed from the 1950s. Israel still behaves as if\u00a0it is ruling militarily over its Palestinian citizens. It is still a Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of\u00a0Jewish citizens over Palestinian “citizens”. It still treats all non-Jews as a threat, as an enemy.<\/p>\n
Israel\u00a0is not a normal kind of state. It is an ethnocracy, and one driven by an ideological\u00a0variation\u00a0of\u00a0the\u00a0ethnic nationalisms that tore apart Europe a century ago.<\/p>\n
Odeh is a leader who campaigns for\u00a0peace and equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Today, he got his answer. His place is bruised, bloodied and bowed, crawling through the dirt. \u00a0This is the language of a\u00a0Jewish state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys\u00a0the situation\u00a0of Palestinians \u2013 these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel \u2013 more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,36],"class_list":{"0":"post-2423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-israel-apartheid","8":"tag-israel-police"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}