Palestinians Are Striking to Fight Apartheid

Article

May 18

Palestinians across Israel, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are on strike today in their largest collective action in decades.They’re demonstrating against Israel’s apartheid system and the recent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, which have killed more than 210 people, including 61 children, and destroyed the building where Al Jazeera and the Associated Press were housed.

One purpose of the strike (which some are comparing to the 1936 Palestinian workers strike) is to draw attention to the fact that this is not, as some media have been portraying it, a conflict between “Israel and Hamas.” This recent phase of protest started when an Israeli court ruled to forcibly remove several Palestinian families from homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, to make way for Israeli settlers. This was viewed as part of a long-term campaign to “Judaize” the city by forcing out Palestinian residents – a point that seems to have been lost in much of the media punditry since then. The actual issue at play here, which the strike highlights, is this: Palestinians are unified in their frustration and anger and grief at a system that denies them basic human rights.

Palestinians have long used general strikes as a tool of resistance, and the images of shuttered shops and restaurants in places like Hebron, Nazareth and Ramallah, and of people playing music in the streets of Haifa in solidarity, are a welcome respite after so much recent news of death and destruction. Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian activist, wrote on Twitter that this display of unity shows that “colonial borders are only effective in the minds of the colonizers.”