Our Hearts Are Bleeding

A few kilometers away from the center of East Jerusalem and its Old City, and while hearing the sound of Israeli military planes heading to Gaza, our hearts here in Bethlehem and around the world are bleeding.

What is happening in Sheikh Jarrah – the dispossession of 149 Palestinians from land that they and their families have possessed for generations – is in a concentrated form of what is happening everywhere in the West Bank: local Palestinians being dispossessed and displaced through ‘legal’ and direct physical violence, to be replaced by Israeli settlers. This amounts to a war crime as it involves the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into the territory that it occupies.

Right now, Israeli war planes are bombing civilian quarters in Gaza. Among the dozens of victims are children. This reign of terror adds to the anxiety and suffocation that dominates life in the Strip, already overwhelmingly affected by the military siege and the spreading of the coronavirus.

We must not forget the violation of the sanctity of Jerusalem as a Holy City, the Israeli police entering the Al Aqsa Mosque with heavy weaponry.

This all shows the complete asymmetry in power between the Israeli military and settlers on the one hand, and the Palestinian civilian population on the other. The latter face an overdose of power and indiscriminate violence made possible by a military occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza that has lasted for 54 years already.

Young Palestinians do not have a future. They are desperate given the vulnerability of the civilian population, the lack of economic prospects, and the lack of independence.

Together with UNOY Peacebuilders, AEI asks for an urgent international intervention to safeguard Palestinians under international law, paving the path to a real just peace that gives Palestinians their due rights and basic human security. Calls for calm to both sides are not enough. The occupation must end.

Written by: Arab Educational Institute, Bethlehem, Palestine

Supported by UNOY Peacebuilders

P.S. Just yesterday we heard this story of a Palestinian family, showing the impact of the settlers’ presence:
My daughter insisted on celebrating her birthday at her grandfather’s house. So we drove to her grandfather’s house, from Ramallah to the Hebron governorate. On the way along the Kiryat Arba settlement, my children, my husband and I were attacked by settlers. They threw stones at our cars and broke its windows. I could only scream from the horror of the scene. My children are less than six years old!