THE recent assaults by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank – in both the Jenin refugee camp and the city of Ramallah (the de facto capital of the Palestinian National Authority) – have led to widespread international condemnation. In Jenin, at least 12 Palestinians were killed, including at least four children, with dozens more maimed or injured, when Israel launched drone attacks and a ground invasion.
Meanwhile, in Ramallah, a 21-year-old Palestinian man was shot dead by the Israeli Army.
Whilst the UK and US governments emphasised what they called Israel’s “right to self-defence”, aid agencies such as the UN humanitarian office, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) condemned Israel for actions that prevented them from responding effectively to the humanitarian emergency created by Israel’s invasion of the Jenin camp.
MSF said that Israel prevented its medical staff from getting to the wounded by bulldozing roads into Jenin. Israel claimed to be targeting Palestinian fighters, but MSF said it was treating wounded people of all ages.
UN spokesperson Vanessa Huguenin said: “We are alarmed at… ground operations that are taking place in Jenin… and air strikes hitting a densely populated refugee camp.”
The WHO’s spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said: “First responders have been prevented from entering the [Jenin] refugee camp, including to reach persons who have been critically injured.”
The attacks in Jenin and Ramallah have sent waves of concern and anger through the global Palestinian diaspora, including the Palestinian community in Scotland. In the aftermath of the invasion I met Wael Shawish, an exiled Palestinian who has made his home in Glasgow.
Shawish was raised in East Jerusalem, which is now under Israeli occupation. Under Israel’s “Law of Return” any Jewish person from anywhere in the world is entitled to take up Israeli citizenship and go to live in the neighbourhood where Shawish grew up. By contrast, he himself, as an exiled Palestinian, cannot return to live there.
“I’m not surprised,” Shawish says of the latest Israeli attacks. The recent invasion of Jenin by Israel’s far-right coalition under prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is, the Palestinian says, typical of Israel’s actions over many decades.
“The Israelis seem to think that collective punishment is a deterrent,” he says. “Any politician who’s got any brains at all will know that this doesn’t work with Palestine.
“Every time they do such a thing, it increases the number of people who are willing to bear arms.”
Shawish believes the Netanyahu administration is deluded if it expects its latest assault on Jenin to turn the inhabitants of the camp against the armed resistance groups, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.
It is ridiculous, he says, for Israel to think that “if they go in and make life miserable for the people of any camp or city” it will lead to the Palestinian people “acting as gatekeepers for them and stop any fighters being in the area”.
In fact, he continues, “the opposite happens.” Just as the Provisional IRA grew in membership following the Bloody Sunday massacre by British paratroopers in Derry in 1972, Shawish predicts an upsurge in recruitment by Palestinian resistance groups following the latest Israeli attacks in Jenin and Ramallah.
The attitude of most Palestinians in the West Bank will be, he says, that the armed groups are their only defence against attacks by the Israeli military and armed gangs from the illegal Israeli settlements (who have, in the words of Bradley Burston, a journalist with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, been conducting “pogroms” against Palestinian communities in recent months). Israel says it wants “quiet”, notes Shawish.
Yet, he continues, many Palestinians have been “quiet” – in the sense of not engaging in armed struggle against Israel – since the inception of the State of Israel 75 years ago. They were “quiet” in 1947-48, during the Zionist militias’ war of occupation in Palestine (which Israel calls the “War of Independence”) and, again, during the Six Day War of 1967 (in which Israel occupied the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, and the Golan Heights in Lebanon).
The result, says the Palestinian exile, is that many of those people are now “in refugee camps in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Syria and other places”. There is, he continues, “nothing in the last 75 years to indicate that, if the Palestinians are not resisting, there is a reward in that”.
If Shawish is appalled, but not surprised, by the latest Israeli attacks in the West Bank, he is also outraged by the UK Conservative government’s “Anti-Boycott Bill” which passed its second reading in the Westminster parliament last Monday by 268 votes to 70 (with 36 SNP MPs and Alba’s Kenny MacAskill among the bill’s opponents).
The bill is aimed at preventing local authorities or any other public bodies from supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign against Israel’s illegal occupation. Indeed, the UK Government has made it clear that the provisions will not apply to any boycotts of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine.
Shawish points to that contradiction, which he believes exposes the hypocrisy of both the Tory government and the Labour opposition. Labour leader Keir Starmer whipped his MPs to abstain on the bill. Only 10 defied him and voted against.
“It’s a specific bill designed to silence the Palestinian voice and the voice of supporters of the Palestinians,” Shawish says. He is disgusted by the implications of the bill for the livelihoods of academics and others who support the upholding of international law with regard to the Israeli occupation.
He finds it extraordinary that, in the UK, we are facing a situation in which “if you don’t support a political system elsewhere in the world [ie: the Israeli state] you don’t get a job. That is the madness of where we are now”.
“What are they worried about?”, Shawish wonders, sardonically.
“Is it that Israel will no longer be a Western ally, or that Israel will stop being a good importer of weapons from Britain?”
