After deadly air strikes on the Jenin refugee camp, the Israeli ground assault begins. Video distributed through Global Wire, which appears to be from a source with the Israeli forces.
The Palestinians of Jenin are determined
to be a free people in their country
by Gush Shalom – The Israeli Peace Bloc
Since this morning (July 3), the Israel media is full of endless talk about an “anti-terror operation”. But this is not at all the correct term to describe the invasion and bombing of the Jenin Refugee Camp by the State of Israel and its army. The correct and accurate term is that this is an attempt to suppress an uprising.
The residents of Jenin, more than in all other Palestinian cities, are fed up with the oppressive Israeli occupation rule that has lasted for fifty-six years already, and are determined to rebel and become a free people in their own country. All the might and power of the IDF, the strongest army in the Middle East, will not be enough to uproot from the hearts of the young people of Jenin the natural and self-evident desire for freedom and liberty.
Suffice it to mention that twenty years ago, during the celebrated “Defensive Wall Operation”, the seed of the army went on a rampage in the Jenin refugee camp, killing many of its inhabitants and loosing the bulldozers to and destroy a large part of the refugee camp – yet by now the destroyed houses that were destroyed were rebuilt and a new generation of Jenin residents returned to the struggle. And so it will continue until a peace-loving government is established in Israel that would dare to take the only necessary and unavoidable decision – to end the occupation, withdraw the army and allow the Palestinians to establish their own independent state alongside the State of Israel.
The organizers of the mass protests against the government’s so-called “Judicial reform” should be condemned for continuing to ignore the elephant in the middle of the room, the elephant of the occupation. Even on this day, they hold militant protest actions solely against legislative initiatives designed to harm Israeli democracy and enfeeble the Supreme Court of the State of Israel – without paying any attention to the fact that in Jenin, on which Israeli rule is being imposed by brutal military force, there is not even an iota of democracy.
To the credit of the protest organizers, it should be noted that they do not heed “patriotic” calls by right wingers and do not hesitate to persist with today’s mass demonstrations and the blocking of the sea port of Haifa and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. They did in no way stop their uncompromising struggle against the government of Israel, even when this government sent “our soldiers” to fight in Jenin.
Anyway, among the protesters the suspicion is growing that the timing of this “operation” in Jenin was deliberately chosen for exactly the same day that the major protest actions were planned throughout Israel. Given the nature of the current Israeli government and the people who set its tone, there are real grounds for such suspicions.
There are precedents in this place. The Israeli Army shot and killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian and US citizen, as she was covering a previous clash in Jenin — just because she was an Arab and they could. Later Israeli police attacked her funeral procession, again just because they could. Graphic by the Palestinian Information Center.
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