Decades of spying and repression: the anti-Palestinian origins of American Islamophobia - It’s often assumed that Islamophobia is the driving force behind US anti-Palestinian bigotry. In fact, it’s the other way around

 "In 1985, a series of linked bombings targeted the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which advocated prominently for Palestine. The organization’s Boston office was bombed, injuring two people, and later that year, Alex Odeh, the west coast director, was killed when a pipe bomb exploded as he opened the door to his office. Two suspects in Odeh’s assassination, associated with the Kahanist Jewish Defense League, fled to Israel, where they have since lived openly in West Bank settlements. One of them, Andy Green (who now goes by Baruch Ben-Yosef), has also been identified as a lead civilian organizer of recent protests blocking humanitarian aid shipments into Gaza."

‘Anti-Palestinianism manifested into a generalized anti-Arab racism, which only later – especially after 9/11– morphed into the more widespread Islamophobia.’ Illustration: Mona Chalabi/The Guardian

Moustafa Bayoumi with illustrations by Mona Chalabi

Thu 23 May 2024 08.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 23 May 2024 15.04 EDT

One evening last Thanksgiving weekend, three 20-year-old Palestinian college students were strolling around Burlington, Vermont, when they were suddenly gunned down by a stranger. One of the victims, Hisham Awartani, is now paralyzed from the waist down. Since they were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic and English, speculation ran high that the young men had been victims of an Islamophobic attack.

The BBC noted that the attack “comes as the US deals with a surge in Islamophobia and antisemitism since the start of the Israel-Gaza war”. Vermont’s Middlebury College described the shooting as evidence of “a marked increase in Islamophobic acts on American campuses and beyond”. A White House statement mentioned how “far too many people live with the fear that they could be targeted and attacked based on their beliefs or who they are”.

But that’s not how Elizabeth Price, the mother of Awartani, seemed to understand the attack. She told WNYC radio that she had raised three children in the West Bank, where children routinely encounter Israeli state and settler violence, and she never believed Hisham would be targeted in the US. In the US, she said, she thought he “would be somewhere safe … I had not realized that to be Palestinian is to be unsafe... READ MORE      https://www.theguardian.com/news/article/2024/may/23/islamophobia-us-palestine-history 

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Mona Chalabi: Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank – visualized... International attention is on Gaza, but attacks by Israelis who live on Palestinian land have been increasing

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Mona Chalabi

Mon 22 Apr 2024

While international attention has been turned toward Gaza, violence against Palestinians has increased in the West Bank too. Israeli settler attacks have become more frequent.

Settlers are Israeli citizens who live on Palestinian land. In most cases, this happens because Palestinians are prevented from accessing their land and are physically attacked by settlers. In a third of cases, Palestinian property is damaged by settlers. These findings come from a UN report published in September 2023 that showed a years-long rise in settler violence against Palestinians. Because of these numbers, the UN has noted that “settler-driven displacement did not start with Hamas’s deadly attack”.

“Settlers attacked us, destroying our homes, water tanks, solar panels and cars,” Abu Khaled, 43, told the UN after being displaced on 28 October. “I felt the presence of death so tangibly as if I saw it with my own eyes … I made the hardest decision in my life: to leave Zanuta and leave everything behind, as memories. I did this to protect my children.” Those who remain are not safe. “They prevent us from grazing our sheep,” Mohamad Abu Seif, 90, said. He has lived with his family in Ein Shibli, a herding community, for over 40 years. They remain vulnerable to threats and harassment by settlers.

The Israeli government routinely acknowledges these colonies as part of the Israeli state despite the fact that they are illegal under international law.

 READ MORE    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/israel-settlers-violence-against-palestine-west-bank 

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Article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention prohibits the “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory”.

 "The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has found that “as a rule, the military prefers to remove Palestinians from their own farmland or pastureland rather than confront settlers”. This has also been the case in recent months, when Israeli forces have accompanied or supported settler attacks in almost half of all incidents, according to the UN. In over a third of the incidents reported since October, settlers threatened Palestinians with firearms, including by opening fire." 

"The thousands of Palestinians who have been forced from their homes have little recourse to justice. In four out of every five cases, Israeli police failed in the investigation of Israelis who harmed Palestinians and their property. This finding comes from Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that has investigated the way Israeli law enforcement treats these settler attacks. It found that between 2005 and 2021, just 3% of ideologically motivated cases resulted in a conviction."