An eviction in East Jerusalem is at the heart of a conflict between Israel and Hamas that has resulted in war. For millions of Palestinians, however, the daily humiliations of occupation are a part of life.
The impending eviction of six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem sparked a wave of protests that contributed to the outbreak of Israel’s latest war with Gaza. The story was exceptional only because it attracted international attention to the roughly three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war and has controlled through decades of failed peace talks.
They are mostly kept in the dark about the terrors and humiliations of the Israeli occupation. Even when the world is oblivious, Palestinians from all walks of life face exasperating impossibilities and petty humiliations, bureaucratic controls that force agonizing choices, and the fragility and cruelty of life under military rule, which is now in its second half-century.
Pressure develops underneath the silence. If the eviction dispute in East Jerusalem lit a fire, the occupation’s provocations continue to add dry kindling on top of it. They are a constant and important driver of the conflict, providing Hamas with an excuse to fire rockets or lone-wolf attackers with grievances to channel into knife or automobile killings. When the fighting is over, the provocations continue.
Raids in the middle of night
A knock on the door isn’t always just that. Badr Abu Alia, 50, was awoken at 2 a.m. in Al Mughrayyir, a village on a ridge in the West Bank, by the sounds of soldiers breaking into his neighbor’s home. When they arrived at his door, they were greeted with a familiar ritual: his children were roused from their beds. Outside, everyone was herded. The soldiers gathered identification cards, said nothing, and plundered the residence. They left two hours later, with a blindfolded teenager from next door.
He’d been at a protest four days before when an Israeli sniper shot and killed a teenager who was wandering among the rock throwers and tear gas canisters. Al Mughrayyir was one of the few
villages that still held weekly protests on Fridays. They began when settlers cut off the villagers’ access to some of their farmland. The death of the young boy became a new rallying cry.
In routine crackdowns aimed at keeping militancy in check, the army says it raids Palestinian homes at night because it is safer, and then ransacks them to look for weapons.
The raids, on the other hand, instill a sense of militancy. Mr. Abu Alia raged as he described seeing his son outside in the dark, “afraid, crying because of the soldiers,” and being powerless to protect him. He continued, “It makes you want to take revenge, to defend yourself.” “However, we have no means of defending ourselves.” He stated that throwing stones would be sufficient. “We can’t just go kill every settler with an M-16. We only have those stones. You can be instantly killed by a bullet. A small stone won’t help much. But at the very least, I’m conveying a message.”
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