PRIOR to Friday’s Palestinian protest, organizers said the march would be non-violent, but warned of possible military fire from Israeli forces. They were dead right. Those 17 Palestinians who were killed in confrontations with Israeli forces during protests at the Gaza border were murdered. Israel says all those who were killed had been trying to breach or damage the border fence that separates Gaza from Israel. The Palestinians threw petrol bombs, burning tires and stones at the fence. They didn’t have guns or rifles. The guards, however, could have used batons to fight back the protesters, or water cannons or stun grenades or rubber or plastic bullets. Instead they used disproportionate real, live bullets.
Aside from being the largest Palestinian demonstration seen in years, and aside from how violent it was, with over 1,400 injured, there is something different about Friday’s riot in that it came from the blue. The protests, given the name Great March of Return, started on Friday, as March 30 marks Land Day, which commemorates the killing of six protesters by Israeli security forces during demonstrations over land confiscation in 1976. The anniversary is marked every year, yet no protest of this magnitude has been staged before.
At all previous peace talks, the Palestinians have always demanded the right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees who left or were forced out of Israel when it was established. However, the talks collapsed in 2014; there has been no public mention of the right to return since.
And if the demonstrations were staged to protest against the miserable conditions of those living in Gaza, the protests have erupted very late. The economic blockade imposed on Gaza has been in force for a decade. So why the protests now?
The timing is strange, but perhaps not that odd. The protest is scheduled to end after six weeks, on May 15. That date falls on the anniversary of the nakba, or catastrophe, which marks the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the conflict surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948. The US will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem around May 15, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence. To move the embassy on the day Israel was created but which on the same day Palestinian land was stolen, that is not a coincidence.
Israelis will be marking mid-May with celebrations at the expense of Palestinian disenfranchisement of their land.
Friday’s march comes as part of the demands of Palestinian refugees for the full implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948, which stipulates that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date”. That date is 70 years overdue.
No Israeli government would ever accept millions of Palestinians since it would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Israel’s position is that Palestinian refugees and their descendants would become citizens of a Palestinian state at the culmination of the peace process. That would be the process which will probably never restart after US President Donald Trump’s highly controversial decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and which has galvanized Palestinian protests against Israel, Friday among them.
Setting the date of the final march to be the day the Trump administration moves the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem carries with it loads of dynamite. The rise of the Trump administration and the extremism characterizing the right-wing government in Tel Aviv reinforce an environment in which the situation is explosive.
Despite the heavy toll, the Palestinians will not leave. They have erected five big camps along the Israel border for more weeks of protests. They are in it for the long haul — with all its deadly consequences.
