By Isabella Bellezza-Smull

THE murderously disproportionate violence meted out against demonstrating Palestinians is only the latest in a long series of deadly responses to popular protests.

On Friday March 30, over 30,000 Palestinians peacefully approached the border area of the Gaza strip to bring attention to their unfulfilled right of return to their families homes inside Israel and to highlight the ongoing plight of living under Israeli occupation. Israeli military forces responded with lethal force, deploying troops, drones, tanks, and snipers who fired on the crowds using live fire, rubber-coated steel pellets, and tear gas.

By the end of the day, scores of Palestinians had been killed — many of them plainly unarmed — and over 1,000 wounded. By the end of the following week, 31 Palestinian lives had been taken, including that of journalist Yaser Murtaja who was hit despite wearing a blue jacket marked with the word "press.” Israeli snipers have shot and wounded five other Palestinian journalists.

March 30th was to mark the start of a of a six-week mobilization leading up to the 70th anniversary of the (Nakaba) day in 1948 when the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians began following the declaration of the State of Israel. It is now the most deadly day in Gaza since heavy Israeli airstrikes ended in 2014.

The toll is shocking, but premeditated. Israel had announced in advance that the protest would be met with lethal violence and sought to preemptively justify its open-fire orders by portraying the 30,000 marchers as armed militants sponsored by Hamas. Yet reports have found that protesters are neither factional nor pose an imminent threat to life. Still, soldiers continue to be instructed to use lethal force outside of life-threatening situations, in violation of international law.

Refugees comprise nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s 1.9 million population. They live under a crippling decades-long economic blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt that has created conditions of permanent crisis. Poverty stands at 65 percent. Unemployment hovers around 45 percent.

Public health conditions in Gaza have deteriorated. An estimated 96 percent of the groundwater supply is undrinkable. Making matters worse, the Trump administration cut more than half of funding to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees - funds that have long provided life saving nutritional and medical support.

Palestinians have the right to protest these conditions peacefully yet continue to be shot down as they do so. The murderously disproportionate violence meted out against demonstrating Palestinians is only the latest in a long series of deadly responses to popular protests.

Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has refused to allow an investigation into the use of live ammunition by its military. He has the support of the Trump Administration who continues to block the UN resolution calling for an inquiry. Eleven Democratic members of US Congress who recently returned from Israel have remained silent.

The viscerally shocking killings in Gaza have recaptured international attention, even securing sympathetic air-time on MSNBC, a major US cable news outlet. The spotlight provides an opportunity to redirect focus to the more insidious side of Israeli occupation, like land grabs and Israeli settlements — well-funded, fortified hilltop cities built in Palestinian territories.

The expropriation of Palestinian land continues unabated, and the development of Israeli settlements has intensified. Just a few months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved building plans for 3,736 new settlement units,announcing in the West Bank “we are here to stay.” Almost 600,000 Israeli citizens currently reside in settlements — a population growing at a rate two times higher than that within Israel.

I recently witnessed the impact of Israel’s land grab and development strategy in the West Bank with a Global Exchange delegation. We heard from Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and homes for alleged security reasons only to later find mobile homes (or, “outposts”) mark the groundbreaking of yet more Israeli subsidized settlements. We maneuvered fairly freely via an expansive network of Israeli-only bypass roads and highways conveniently facilitating movement between settlements and Israel proper.

Conversely, we observed hundreds of checkpoints, walls, permit requirements, and Israeli soldiers tightly confining Palestinians to ever shrinking territory. I discovered that this maze of control makes it so a Palestinian might grow up able to view the Mediterranean from her town without ever having received a permit allowing her to travel to its shore. Several Palestinian teens expressed dreams of one day touching the sea.

Israel justifies many of its land grabs and extensive system of control in the West Bank as defensive measures proportionate to the threat of Palestinian and Arab aggression. Recent history is often referenced: like the 1967 Six-Day War provoked by a coalition of neighboring Arab states, two Palestinian Intifadas, or uprisings, in 1987 and in 2000, and Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians — a strategy that gained traction during the Intifada.

Palestinians, though, view Israel’s security justification as yet another pretext to displace them from their homes. It’s seen as a palatable guise for Israel’s century long “colonial gentrification” of historic Palestine — the uprooting of indigenous peoples by settlers and imperialist powers. While impossible to list the litany of historic grievances, Palestinians often reference the demographic history of the Southern Levant, a region that for hundreds of years had been overwhelmingly populated by an Arab Muslim majority. The 1917 Balfour Declaration (whereby the British declared that the then Ottoman region would become a Jewish national home, despite Jews only accounting for 3-5 percent of the population at the time) is referenced as a destructive political landmark that, along with the 1947 United Nations Partition Resolution 181, paved the way for the formation of the Jewish state in 1948 against the will of indigenous populations.

Roots of the conflict depend on how far back one wants to go. Ideological settlers like Ardie, a Chicago-born Israeli who has lived in Israeli settlements in the West Bank since 1985, take the discussion to biblical times. The “right of return” for the Jewish diaspora, according to Ardie, rests in part on the premise that they — a unified people of the BCE Kingdoms of Israel and Judah — were there first. Over coffee and cookies, he explained:

This was Judea before it was Palestine. The Romans named it Philistina after the Philistines, our enemies, to humiliate us, rebrand us, and erase our identity. They overran us and dispersed us, and we lived around the world for thousands of years. We are unique in that we are a people with a memory that compelled us to return to our ancient homeland — and we came back.

While ancient historical claims to Palestine are commonly used to justify Israeli expansion into the occupied territories, their historicity and relevance to the 21st century conflict is often called into question.

George Rishmawi from the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People agrees that the blast to the ancient past isn’t helpful:

The issue isn’t who was here first, thousands of years ago. The issue is who, less than 100 years ago, came here. And what did they do to the people they found? Displacing more than 700 thousand Palestinians from their land and turning them into refugees can never be justified under any pretext.

Another justification for the land grabs offered by an Israeli settler is that we live in a world of winners and losers where winners enjoy the spoils of war and losers suffer. The ugliness of this logic reflects the reality on the ground where a highly securitized apartheid reality is causing tremendous suffering to Palestinians. Squashed into ever shrinking towns with no territorial contiguity, it’s no wonder Palestinians tend to describe their situation as “living under siege” on “islands surrounded by a sea of Israeli control."

Despite a stifling set of constraints and dismal near-term prospects for a just peace, Palestinians courageously resist the indignities of occupation every day. In the weeks to come, they will continue to protest for their rights, and the Israeli military will continue to meet them with lethal force.

Farming sisters Fadeyeh and Ne’amehwere cut off from their land after it was seized to form part of a so-called “security” buffer zone around a settlement. The creation of these special security areas became common in the wake of the second Intifada when suicide bombings that targeted Israeli civilians became a common tactic used by Palestinian armed resistance groups.

Theoretically, farmers can apply for permits to tend and cultivate the expropriated land under the watch of Israeli military personnel. In practice, the process is sabotaged by coordination challenges with the Israeli Civil Administration and aggression from settlers. Muhamad Barakat, an East Jerusalemite with an encyclopedic knowledge of the region, says the sisters typically get 10 days of approved access to their land while suffering beatings and insults from young settlers in the process. — Courtesy NAWA

— Isabella Bellezza-Smull works for Global Exchange, an international human rights organization based in San Fransisco. She previously worked with the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro after graduating from Swarthmore College.