In the past week, Israel’s unbounded arrogance has again expanded, acting in a manner that defies reasoning, rationale and reality. Firstly, it has decided that it cares not one iota for international condemnation – that’s hardly new in itself – to go ahead with the construction of 300 new colonist homes in occupied East Jerusalem. The decision is provocative, preposterous and poisonous to any hopes of maintaining a veneer of peace and stability, and is an affront to a chorus of international voices who have rightfully objected to Israel’s wrongdoings.
These new proposed homes are being built on property stolen from generations of Palestinians, with foundations laid on the ruins of houses that have stood for years. They will provide homes for colonists who have bought into Israel’s racist and bigoted philosophy – colonists who can sleep easy at night ignoring the injustice wrought on Palestinians, their homeland stolen, their sons imprisoned without trial, their wells destroyed, olive groves felled, and hopes for a homeland crushed under Israeli forces who shoot and kill without consequence.
If this insult isn’t bad enough, Israel’s lawmakers have now decided that they have the right to forcefeed Palestinians who use hunger striking as a means of political expression. And those Palestinians are mostly held without trial, without charge, and without the rights that are afforded most other detainees around the world.
Israel has now decided that it is human to physically restrain a hunger-striking protester, strap him in a metal chair, and force a plastic tube up the nose and down into the stomach, pump liquid proteins in, and then leave the prisoner restrained for two more hours lest he try and induce vomiting in an act of defiance for the endured force feeding.
In these two acts, Israel has clearly said that it will steal Palestinian land, demolish homes, build new colonist developments there, arrest those who protest, hold them without trial, and inflict the torture of forcefeeding on those who continue to resist through hunger-striking. If that’s not arrogance, we are sadly mistaken.
