Where The Line Is Drawn XXVIII

"They could reinterpret international legal conventions as they pleased, they could label all criticism as anti-Semitic, they could blast Palestinians from the air, they could take their land and water, and they could get away with it. Because the world would be tolerant." (pp. 220-221)

"...a number of Yemini Jews took to wearing T-shirts which read: 'I'm a Yemini Jew', to avoid being mistaken for Arabs and attacked." (p. 221)

When a member of staff at the Hebrew University was asked whether he understood the significance of making Arab workers wear yellow tags for identification, he replied that the tags were orange.

"It is never right to conflate tragedies, but it is also wrong to use one tragedy to justify another, as Israeli propagandists have done." (p. 222)

"So worried is Israel by the memory of the Nakba that in March 2011 the Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law, depriving any state-funded body that commemorated the Nakba of its budget. In this way, Israel is attempting to erase the memory of the most traumatic event in Palestinian history." (p. 223)

So there are Holocaust deniers and Nakba deniers.

"...the Sephardi Chief Rabbi declared that non-Jews should not be allowed to live in the land of Israel." (p. 224)

Where The Line Is Drawn XXVII

"By Easter week 2016, six months after the [uprising] began, thirty Israelis had lost their lives and over 200 Palestinians had lost theirs. Thousands were imprisoned, including over 400 children." (p. 217)

Resist, yes. Resist with violence, no. Would the Israeli response be less violent if all the resistance were non-violent? I don't know. A pointless question.

International pressure is needed. Boycott and disinvestment. Israel is racist.

Where The Line Is Drawn XXVI

14 Lunch At Everest: Beit Jalla, 2013
"...Judy was one of the women who in December 1988 started Women in Black, holding vigils every Friday at which they carried 'Stop the Occupation' posters in Hagar Square in Jerusalem and endured the hostility of passers-by." (p. 210)

During the uprising that began in October 2015, some resistance was violent, some not, but:

"The Israeli government responded with violence, defining all resistance as terrorism." (p. 216)

Citizens were encouraged to carry weapons and:

"The Palestinians who were shot were often left to bleed to death." (p. 217)

A sergeant in the Israeli army medical corps found a Palestinian lying on the ground bleeding from a bullet wound and shot him point blank in the head. He said, "'This terrorist must die.'" (ibid.) His family hugged him, the Israeli public considered him a hero, thousands demonstrated to support him, 60% of young people thought that he had done right and Netanyahu "...called his family to express his support." (p. 218) Netanyahu also said that fences and barriers would defend Israel "...against the wild beasts." (ibid.)

Where The Line Is Drawn XXV

13 Israel At My Doorstep: Ramallah, 2009 (pp. 193-203)
"As the years went by, the border closed in on us. Israel drew closer and closer to Ramallah. By January 2009, Israel was a mere five kilometres from my home. It had been ten years since I could walk in the valley near my house or drive down the road to A'yn Qenya, to enjoy the spring there." (p. 193)

"On 8 October 1990, after the massacre at Al Aqsa when Israeli police killed some twenty Palestinians and injured over 150, some settlers on their way home shot at the window where my wife was standing. Had Penny not ducked, the bullet would have struck her in the head." (p. 194)

"...the grave of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshipers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994, had become a venerated site." (p. 198)

A settler asked Shehadeh what he was doing there and told him:

"'I'm different from you. I'm living here. Really living here, not just like you.'" (p. 199)

"The man we had encountered was a notorious settler called Flicks, who always came to the village, blocked the road, threw stones at the houses and once threw fruit juice at young men standing by the side of the road. He always went through town on his way to pray at Yad Yair." (p. 200)

(Yad Yair was a shrine to the memory of a murdered settler, Yair Mendelssohn.)

Institutionalized racism: Flicks feels entitled not only to settle but also to abuse those who already live there.

Where The Line Is Drawn XXIV

12 Shocking News: Ramallah, 2006 (pp. 179-191)
The "shocking news" is of the serious illness of the author's Israeli friend, Henry.

Three passages in this chapter are relevant to life and death in Palestine:

"When I arrived home, Ramallah was in mourning. The latest Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip had killed fourteen people in twenty-four hours, six from one family who last year had lost four of its members. Among the dead were two infants." (p. 182)

"That morning the body of a young man from the Jewish settlement of Itmar who was kidnapped and killed was found..." (p. 185)

The army arrested a masked young man who confessed. Then:

"The army stormed into Ramallah and arrested Hamas legislators and ministers..." (ibid.)

Henry emailed:

"...an Israeli
"Targeted assassination missile murdered a woman and her seven children:
"How can that be called war
"But bloody, bloody, bloody bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody revenge..." (pp. 187-188)

(I have reproduced the six repetitions of "bloody" and five commas from the text.)