The Gazafication of the West Bank: ‘Is This Really Happening Again?'
Netanyahu is doing what his government promised all along: level the West Bank just as it did Gaza.
Note from the editor:
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- Mehdi
When Israeli tanks invaded Jenin last weekend, a friend in Bethlehem called me to say, “Is this really happening, again? At least we know what to do this time!” She was trying to sound upbeat, but I knew that she was masking what we felt back in 2002 when we saw tanks invade our city of Ramallah. I still remember the moment that the Israeli army forced me out of my home in the middle of the night in Ramallah and running to avoid live bullets at 2 am. I was not allowed back into my home for days. This time around, it is different. The 40,000 people who have been forced out of their homes in West Bank cities like Jenin and Tulkarm will not be allowed to return – ever – and the army has said it will stay for a year.
In Tulkarm, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, late last week, made sure to post a picture of himself seated in the house of a Palestinian family. On the walls of that home, the Israeli army put up the Israeli flag and the flag of the Israeli army brigade that took over the house. Netanyahu and his army generals casually sat on their living room furniture and made themselves at home in a place that is not their home, a place to which they were not invited and in which they do not belong.
This image is strikingly similar to the hundreds, if not thousands, of images that Israeli soldiers have proudly displayed over 15 months of genocide in Gaza, with Israeli soldiers making themselves at home in the homes of Palestinians from Gaza who have fled Israel’s bombs. (Not ironically, this is precisely what Israelis did in 1948 – “make themselves at home” in places that were not, in fact, their homes.)
But the similarities between what Israel did to Palestinians in 1948, what it did in Gaza, and what it is starting to do in the West Bank are not simply pictures. Netanyahu and his ministers have declared precisely what they intend to do in the West Bank.