New Solidarity Among Palestinians Creates Fresh Challenge for Israel
JERUSALEM— Muna el-Kurd’s campaign against Israeli plans to evict her family and neighbors from east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood has turned the 23-year-old into a social-media star, with more than a million Instagram followers. Triggered in part by this neighborhood standoff, the latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raged for 11 days across Gaza, Israel and the West Bank. Ms. Kurd and fellow activists call it a new kind of Palestinian uprising. While Friday’s cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hamas stopped the airstrikes and rockets, protests go on across the Palestinian territories and among Israel’s Arab citizens.
(snip)
This month’s conflagration, combined with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s steady embrace of the Jewish far right, has infused these communities with a sense of shared purpose. “Common oppression has led to the creation of a unified struggle,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a former Palestinian Authority minister of information who heads a party called National Initiative. To Ms. Kurd and her fellow supporters, the way forward is clear. “We want all of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” she said as a group of Jewish settlers walked, under police protection, in front of her home. “There is no such thing called Israel.”
(snip)
When young Palestinian activists speak of a one-state solution, the meaning is not always the same. On one end of the spectrum are those, backed by some on the Israeli left, who envision a binational state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea where everyone, Arab and Jew, has the same rights. To many other Palestinians, the one-state solution means simply turning the tables. Mr. Shuaibi, the activist in Ramallah, said he expected many of Israel’s 7 million Jews would leave.
Ms. Kurd, the 23-year-old in east Jerusalem, went further, saying she was sure that at the first sight of a proper Palestinian uprising, Israeli Jews would flee “to Europe or America or wherever they’re from.” When reminded that the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews were born in the country and have nowhere else to go, Ms. Kurd, wearing skinny jeans and white sneakers, waved one hand dismissively while clutching her iPhone in the other: “This is their problem.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-gaza-clash-new-solidarity-arises-among-palestinians-11621791183 (subscription)
= new reply since forum marked as read
