Friday was the last day of a six-week protest by Palestinians at the Gaza-Israel border but there is more to come. The protests are expected to reach their climax on Monday May 14 when the US embassy opens in Jerusalem. The day after will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and Palestinian dispossession. These two days threaten to collide with the seismic force of meteors hurtling through outer space.
Although it’s hard to predict whether there will be sustained violence this coming week and how intense it will be, the past one and a half months could be a precursor of what to expect. For six weeks Palestinians railed at the Gaza fence. They were peaceful but the Israeli response was anything but. The one Palestinian killed on Friday brought to close to 50 the number killed during the protest with thousands injured by Israeli fire. The laws of armed conflict did not apply regarding the Gaza protests. The Israeli army’s rules of engagement did not meet international standards of law enforcement, which, in paraphrase, says lethal force against unarmed civilians who do not pose a danger is illegal. The use of live ammunition was supposed to be a last resort. With Israel, shooting Palestinians dead was the first thing that came to mind.
Israel claims it only targeted protesters who threatened the border and tried as much as possible to shoot only at the legs. Facing global condemnation for answering the protestors with bullets, Israel struggled to convince a skeptical world that its response was proportional. It, of course, failed to persuade. How could it when not a single Israeli soldier was killed or wounded?
There were two reasons why Palestinians protested at the fence. It is the symbolic separator that has cut them off from the outside world because of a 10-year blockade that has exacerbated their poverty. Since 2007, Israel has maintained a devastating economic blockade of the strip, which has the highest unemployment rate in the world and has become far poorer than the other main Palestinian territory, the West Bank.
Then there is the Great March of Return. Thousands of Palestinians gathered near the Gaza border with Israel demanding their right of return to the villages and towns that they were expelled from or fled in 1948 when the state of Israel was created.
It is this anniversary of one of the biggest land dispossessions in history that is being coupled with the unveiling of the new site of the US embassy, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, shattering decades of US policy. At almost the same time as 800 guests will be attending Monday’s ceremony, including Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner, and members of Congress, tens of thousands of Gazans will be massing along the Gaza-Israeli border to cap the rallies they started on March 30. The juxtaposition of Israeli festivity and Palestinian rage at virtually the same moment is as extraordinary as it is volatile.
The fire had already been lit. The embassy transfer was preceded by President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, breaking with decades of US foreign policy that withheld such recognition until the city’s final status had been worked out by Palestinians and Israelis in a peace agreement. And in the coming weeks, Palestinians are bracing themselves for the unveiling of Trump’s “deal of the century”, a peace plan that is largely expected to fail the Palestinians.
The next few days will be tense. Israelis will be celebrating May 14 as the date when they declared their independence while Palestinians lament the day after as the day they lost their independence. It will be a week of reckoning.
