Family members of the Israeli captives held by Hamas in Gaza are among the loudest voices opposing the carpet bombing of the besieged strip by the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF), killing over 18,000 Palestinians, about 70% of whom are women and children.
“We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you,” protested a former Israeli captive at the meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet on December 5.
Another former captive said that they were wounded when the IOF bombed the hideout in which they were held. She was one of the 105 captives [80 Israelis, one Russian-Israeli, and 24 foreign nationals] freed during the seven-day truce, in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian teenagers and women, imprisoned in Israel mostly without charges..
Adding that an Israeli helicopter had also “fired at us on our way to Gaza,” she complained, “You claim there is intelligence, but the reality is that we were being bombed.” Reminding the war cabinet that her husband is still in Gaza, held in the tunnels, she asked, “And you’re talking about flooding the tunnels with seawater?”
Angry family members of the captives yelled “shame” at Netanyahu in the meeting. The transcripts of an audio recording of the meeting were published in part in a report by Israeli news website Ynet.
Over 120 captives remain in Gaza, including roughly 60 Israeli soldiers. Families of the captives have been pressuring Israel’s government in meetings and through several demonstrations to release all Palestinians held in Israeli prisons to secure the return of all the Israeli captives held in Gaza by Hamas.
Hamas had raised this demand on October 7 after its fighters broke out of the 17-year-long siege on Gaza into Israel and took captives back with them in an operation it called the Al-Aqsa Flood.
At the time, around 4,764 Palestinians were in Israeli detention or prisons on grounds of “security.” About 1,319 of them were held under “administrative detention,” indefinitely, without charges or the right to trial, “based on classified evidence that is not revealed” to the prisoner.
This number has more than doubled since, with 2,873 held in administrative detention as of December 1. “Since 7 October, more than 3,000 Palestinians have been arrested” in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) of West Bank, “in many instances without any direct evidence of the commission of an offense,” UN Human Rights Office-OPT said in a statement on December 1.
The more than 500,000 Jews brought in mostly from North America and Europe to settle illegally in occupied West Bank, displacing the native Palestinians, enjoy the protections of civil courts, even as 308 settler attacks on Palestinians have been reported here since October 7.
But the Palestinians in the West Bank—more than 266 of whom have been killed and over 3,365 injured since October 7 by settlers and Israeli soldiers—are denied the same right and tried instead by a military court, which has imprisoned about 13,000 Palestinian children since 2000.
Even within Israel’s internationally recognized border—excluding the territories occupied since the 1967 war—laws have been discriminating against Palestinians, well before 2018 when the parliament declared that “national self-determination” is an “exclusive right” of the Jews.
Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian citizens live in fear
Called Arab-Israelis, these Palestinians are second-class citizens of Israel, who, along with those deemed “permanent residents” in Jerusalem, add up to just over 20% of Israel’s population.
They are the descendants of the 150,000 Palestinian inhabitants who had managed to stay back on their land from which 750,000 other Palestinians were ethnically cleansed after the State of Israel was established with British support in 1948, taking over almost 78% of historic Palestine.
Since October 7 until the beginning of the now-expired truce, about 200 Palestinian citizens of Israel had been arrested. These include the former member of parliament and chairperson of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, Mohammad Barakeh, and four other Palestinian political leaders who tried to hold a protest last month in Nazareth against the war on Gaza.
At least 100 Palestinian citizens were arrested for their social media activity, and over 50 were fired, demoted or suspended from their jobs within the first two weeks of the war.
Palestinian students are unable to return to Netanya College from where they had to evacuate when their campus dormitories were attacked in late October by a mob of hundreds of far-right Jewish Israelis, whom the city’s mayor was seen inciting. About 160 Palestinian students were subject to disciplinary measures in Israeli Universities as of November 25 for their social media posts.
Last month, Israel’s parliament amended its already draconian Counter Terrorism Law to criminalize “systematic and continuous consumption of publications of a terrorist organization,” including Hamas in this category along with ISIS.
Calling it “one of the most intrusive and draconian legislative measures ever passed by the Israeli Knesset (parliament),” Adalah, a rights organization for Palestinians in Israel, warned that this amendment amounted to criminalizing “thoughts and beliefs.”
“At a time when Israeli authorities are ramping up their campaign to stifle the freedom of expression of Palestinian citizens of Israel, conducting extensive surveillance of their online communications, and making unprecedented arrests for alleged speech-related offenses, the Israeli Knesset has enacted legislation that criminalizes even passive social media use,” added its statement.
Accusations of supporting Hamas or supporting terrorism stalk anyone in Israel expressing sympathy for the Palestinians being killed and injured in Gaza, in what over 800 legal scholars have described as a “potential genocide.” Those convicted of the charge of supporting Hamas can even be stripped of their citizenship under a new legislation that Israel’s Justice and Interior Ministers are set to introduce as a bill in the parliament.
Crackdown against anti-war Jewish Israelis
The crackdown has not even spared the anti-war Jewish Israelis, who, unlike the Palestinians in the country, are full citizens of Apartheid Israel.
“Israeli citizens who are showing the slightest sentiment for the people of Gaza, opposing the killing of innocent civilians… are being politically persecuted. They go through public shaming, they lose their jobs, they are being put in jail,” Meir Baruchin told Democracy Now.
He was fired from his job as a high school teacher after he was arrested last month for a social media post criticizing the killing of civilians in Gaza, and held in solitary confinement for four days before being released with charge of treason.
When a court ordered the release of 68-year-old Yoav Brar, arrested and accused of being a “key activist in protests that support and express solidarity with Hamas,” far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, took to incitement against the judge, who was an Arab Israeli.
The pro-Palestinian “posters, signs, flags and media” found in Brar’s home “was not enough for Judge Ihsan Kanaan, who decided to release him during wartime. This is what internal enemies look like,” said Ben-Gvir, an illegal settler in the West Bank who, before being recruited as a minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, was convicted by the Jerusalem District Court of supporting a terrorist organization he had joined at the age of 16.
36-year-old journalist Israel Frey, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, has been forced to go into hiding after a right-wing mob attacked his home because he had included in his prayer the victims of Israel’s bombardment in Gaza, along with those Israelis killed in the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7.
The Jewish Israelis opposing the atrocities in Gaza, however, make up a tiny minority in the country. Even as protests demanding “Stop the Genocide” intensify in major cities worldwide, several of them organized by Jewish groups, the vast majority of the Jews in Israel support the atrocities committed by its military in Gaza.
According to a survey published by Tel Aviv University last month, only 1.8% of Jewish Israelis believed “too much” firepower was being used in Gaza. 36.6% opined that the Israeli forces were using “appropriate” force, while 57.5% wanted more, believing there was “too little use of firepower” against the more than 2 million Palestinians virtually imprisoned in the 365 sq. km strip of land Israel has besieged since 2006.
Even the families of the Israeli captives held by Hamas faced “counter-demonstrations and even some attacks by pro-Netanyahu right-wingers” when they were demonstrating for a ceasefire to exchange Palestinian prisoners for the Israelis in Hamas’ custody. They were trolled “on social media by right-wingers telling them that the release of captives was not important, destroying Gaza was,” said Ofer Neiman, who leads Boycott from Within to support the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
Angry members of the captives’ families were reportedly “screaming” for Netanyahu’s resignation in the meeting on December 5.
Although confident that Netanyahu is on his way out, Neiman nevertheless fears that he seeks to drag this war on Gaza, escalate toward a full-fledged confrontation with Lebanon, and even bring about a regional conflagration, “trying to draw the US into a war with Iran.” Because “Netanyahu depends on the war for his survival now,” Neiman told Peoples Dispatch.
Before October 7, weekly mass protests demanding his resignation had been underway since the start of this year, after his far-right government introduced “reforms” that undermined the judiciary, effectively subordinating it to the parliament.
“A war within the Zionist apartheid tribe”
The protests were mainly populated by Liberal Jewish Israelis who perceived this as a threat to the liberties and safeguards they were enjoying, even as the Palestinian citizens were deprived of the same. The small groups of leftists who brought Palestinian flags to these protests to raise the issue of apartheid and occupation were often attacked by the protesters who snatched and tore the tricolor.
Neiman described the conflict between this protest movement and Netanyahu’s government as “a war within the Zionist apartheid tribe: Tel Aviv-based liberals vs right-wing religious settlers of the occupied West Bank. But this conflict is now frozen. They are all brothers-in-arms now, fighting together, killing children in Gaza.”
However, even though these protests have come to a halt since October 7, resentment against Netanyahu has continued to grow, with polls showing that 76% of Israelis want his resignation. Netanyahu’s policy of diverting the Israeli forces to help expand the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, where his far-right government has its strongest support base, is perceived as the main reason southern Israel was left vulnerable to the Hamas fighters on October 7.
Many of the areas that came under attack were largely populated by liberals who took regular part in the anti-Netanyahu protests, Neiman said, adding, “I am sure Netanyahu will be succeeded by a more mainstream centrist like Benny Gantz.” However, Netanyahu’s replacement by Gantz will not move Israeli politics any closer to ending apartheid against Palestinians and occupation of their homeland, he argued.
It may ease the current crackdown on dissident Jewish Israelis and allow space for groups promoting harmony within Israel with its Palestinian citizens, but the ending of Israeli Apartheid and occupation “will require a long-term shift in Israeli society,” he added.
Neiman sees no scope of building “an organic anti-apartheid mass movement within Israel,” given the settler colonial character of the state. “Jewish Israelis, including the working class, benefit from the status quo. There are no material incentives to end apartheid and occupation,” unless international sanctions hurt its economy, he argued. “That is why we need BDS.”
Despite the social isolation and the risk of state persecution, Neiman and his comrades in Boycott from Within take such a position because “our lesson from the holocaust is never again—for anyone. Unlike this tribal lesson many have drawn as never again for Jews.”
They advocate a common “democracy between the river and the sea,” with equal rights for Jewish Israelis as well as the Palestinians, including the refugees who exercise the UN-recognized “Right to Return”.
