Daniel Amir: Gaza protests another example of how the Israeli right is immune to criticism // Juan Cole - Shooting Protesters in Cold Blood: How Israel became a Typical Middle Eastern Dictatorship
On Friday, as Jewish people prepared to
celebrate Passover and
Christians gathered for Easter, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza
Strip participated in largely
non-violent protests as part of the Great Return March. Palestinian
participants began walking towards the fence that separates the strip
from Israel and were met with live
fire that saw hundreds of people injured and 16 killed.
The protests were held
to commemorate Land Day and demonstrate for the rights of Palestinian refugees
to be resettled in Israel. Israel’s response was that Hamas, which controls the
strip, had “cynically” sent women and children to the fence as a human
shield. Rather than expressing the grievances of Palestinians at large, then,
the protests were to be seen in the context of long-standing tensions between
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The ever-deteriorating
humanitarian situation in Gaza and the stagnation of negotiations for a lasting
solution for peace in the region, Israel argued, were less relevant. The Israeli response
drew widespread criticism around the world, with UN Secretary General Antonio
Guterres calling for an independent inquiry into Friday’s
events. But Israel has already hardened itself against such international
attention. As a focus on Hamas in its narrative of the march shows, the Israeli
right constantly strives to portray a naive international community that fails
to appreciate the existential threat the country must face. .. read more:
Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
Shooting Protesters in Cold Blood: How Israel became a Typical Middle Eastern Dictatorship
The Israeli army
snipers who were ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinian protesters last Friday at
the Gaza border, killing 17 outright and wounding hundreds of
others, were acting according to the contemporary script of Middle Eastern
dictators. The Israeli army initially admitted in a tweet that the tactic was
premeditated and precise, but then deleted the tweet, as the Israeli peace
group B’tselem
pointed out
Sociologists who study
how people mobilize to challenge an oppressive situation have noted that one
possible response of any regime under pressure from below is to raise the cost
to dissidents of their social action. Imposing the death penalty is of course
the ultimate in raising such costs. But randomly shooting into crowds is more
than just threatening people with death. It is a means of terrorizing the
dissidents. Simply taking hundreds of people out and executing them has dangers
as a course of action for the oppressive rulers, as well, inasmuch as it
threatens to create large numbers of martyrs and impel reprisals. Moreover,
large massacres can impose costs on the regime in the form of boycotts from
other states or civil society actors. Randomly shooting into a crowd, killing a
few people but wounding many others, has the advantage for the regime of
creating uncertainty and fear.
This tactic was
deployed during the youth protests of 2011. Secret police in Tunisia shot into
peaceful rallies in provincial towns in late December 2010 and early January
2011 and then denied it and ordered the state press not to cover it. Blogger
Lina Ben Mhenni took her smartphone to the hospitals down there and got
pictures of and interviews with the victims and put them up at her blog (very
bravely, since the regime could have direly punished her; but it fell before it
could do so).
https://www.juancole.com/2018/04/shooting-protesters-dictatorship.html
